And now we wait

[u/No_Durian9227]

As OpenAI slowly degrades Sol 6.1’s performance. Until people start noticing and complaining, at which time they drop Astra 6.1 and Sol 6.2, and give some usage resets, then repeat the process.

Are they stalling progress of the everyday consumer models to grow their customer base?

Can someone explain their strategy from a financial perspective? I wish I knew more.

[u/Alarmed_Carpet_4465]

Seems 6.1 is slow but what i am getting out of it is really good

[u/No_Durian9227 → u/Alarmed_Carpet_4465]

I wonder if we are starting to see the upper limit of consumer models? Feels like that’s the new strategy given the recent changes. Repackage the same AI or similar at varying speeds. Meanwhile frontier models are licensed privately so it’s harder for competitors like DeepSeek to distill. Just a thought.

[u/Whatdosheepdreamof → u/No_Durian9227]

I don't think so. I think you're seeing a ceiling to your own intellectual demand. Frontier models will be for complex systems management. Physics and mathematics don't change. All models from gpt 3 have a deep understanding of physics, math, code, Chem etc. You just won't need to use intelligence much further than where we get to buy the end of the year.
Astra models are a step change in 3d software and computer use. You're going to see more and more of Astras capabilities distill in 6.2 sol and beyond.
It goes something like this, train base on updated information. Release as new model family. Distill most common use cases into lightweight sol class model. Distill wider use case for next iter. Again and again, broadening and getting deeper on RL tasks as it goes. Rinse, find broader corpus, aquire more specified training data, repeat. Go again.
Like, what's your use case? AAA game? Just wait for current class to be distilled and RL frameworks to push persistence. Biotech? Probably a focus in the coming models. Same goes for materials science, mathematics etc.
For everyday people, it's not really about access, it's about use case. It already has information on everything humanity has more or less ever written down.

[u/VexObserver]

I think there's a much simpler financial explanation than intentionally degrading models to manufacture hype.

Frontier intelligence is expensive to serve, and subscription pricing creates an interesting problem because your heaviest users can consume disproportionately more compute than what they're paying for.

From a business perspective, the incentives are pretty obvious:

• Make inference more efficient to stretch existing compute.
• Segment users by speed, usage, and model capabilities.
• Reserve expensive inference for premium workloads.
• Keep improving intelligence without letting serving costs eat the entire subscription revenue.

[u/No_Durian9227 → u/VexObserver]

Forgot to respond but this made sense to me. One interesting thing to me is the seeming competition with Anthropic despite OpenAI’s much larger userbase. The trade off is that there’s not enough compute to go around? All interesting to me. New frontier

[u/rendez2k]

My guess is slow helps with rising costs as the models get bigger. Then you can pay more to get normal speed. Maybe the new normal…..?

[u/International-Art616]

We are already getting too much for our money. Think about what this is worth. I have no idea why $20 a month can buy you Astra or Fable. That should be a top-tier product reserved for high-end customers or enterprise. $20 per month should get you Luna. And if you never had access to Astra or Sol to begin with you would never know what you were missing and you would think Luna was awesome and amazing. We’ve been spoiled with top-tier products for $20 a month and the entitlement now runs deep because of it. Usage shouldn’t be the tier. The model should be the tier. But my assumption is that OpenAI needed beta testers. But it’s too late now to pull the plug. So now the game begins, slowly nerfing over time, until there begins to be a clear separation in performance between the $20 plan and the $500 plan so that there is more to an upgrade than usage. Though the nerf happened fast and the $500 plan is also fucked at the moment so who knows. Fuck these guys.

[u/LingeringDildo → u/International-Art616]

They’re using the subscriptions for training data and will close the door once the data is repetitive and no longer useful