Monologue: OpenAI Is Getting Desperate

In this week's monologue, Ed Zitron goes through the underwhelming release of OpenAI's GPT-4.5 - and how OpenAI's rumored new pricing structure suggests this company is in trouble. Here's the article cited from The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-plots-charging-20-000-a-month-for-phd-level-agents?rc=kz8jh3 --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 0:41Ed Zitron?

  Hello you, it's your better offline monologue and I'm your host Ed Zitron.

• 0:52Ed Zitron?

  Now, next week I'm gonna have a two-part that digs into Microsoft's data center pullback and OpenAI's shaky new funding situation, but this week's monologue focuses on OpenAI's new model, GPT-4.5. You may be wondering what it does differently to GPT-4.0 or Claude Sonnet 3.7 or any number of other large language models, and if I'm honest, I have absolutely no idea. Thankfully, neither does Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who said, and I quote, "The GPT-4.5 was the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to him," which makes me wonder what the other models have been like. So I went back and looked. So compare this to the launch of GPT-4.0, which Altman called OpenAI's best

• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  model ever, saying that it was "fast, smart, natively multimodal," referring to the ability to accept text as well as audio and video, and photos as well, and available to all ChatGPT users, including on their free plan, adding that it was "a very good model, especially at coding." By contrast, Altman summarized GPT-4.5 as "a giant expensive model, one that required hundreds of thousands of GPUs to launch beyond ChatGPT Pro. It started there. It's still not, as I record this, out to Plus users or free users." Now, GPT Pro, of course, is OpenAI's $200 a month subscription, and it's unclear when Plus, which is the $20 a month one, will get it, but apparently it's in the next few days.

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  Altman also added that GPT 4.5 isn't a reasoning model and won't crush benchmarks on account of it being a different kind of intelligence that has, and all of these are quotes, "magic to it that Sam Altman had not felt before." Yeah, just, you know shit's not doing well when you have to just be like, "It's magic. It's, it's literally magic. I made magic. Now, what does the magic do? I'm, I'm really not sure." In fact, it's pretty difficult to find exactly what it is that GPT 4.5 does differently, or what it's good at, or indeed really anything about it. Benj Edwards over at AskTentacle had one developer call it a lemon.

• 2:59Ed Zitron?

  "GPT 4.5 costs an incredible $75 per million input tokens, prompts and data pushed into a model, and $150 per million output tokens, as in the thing it creates. A token is like .7, I think one token is maybe three words. Someone will get up my arse for this. Nevertheless, this seems like a lot. It isn't when you're running a company." And by the way, this is roughly 3,000% more expensive for input tokens and 1,500% more expensive for output tokens than GPT 4.0, for results that OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy described as "a little bit better and awesome, but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to." That translates to "it's a little bit better, but I can't really tell you why."

• 3:45Ed Zitron?

  And yes, you're gonna hear me say something similar in next week's episode, because the larger picture for OpenAI right now is pretty fucking dire, considering their main backer, SoftBank, has to borrow billions of dollars to fund them. Nevertheless, back to 4.5. Since launch, which was for some reason on the day that Sam Altman's child was being born in the hospital, he's been posting some really weird shit since, though. A few days after launch, Altman claimed that GPT 4.5 was the first time people had been emailing with such passion, asking that OpenAI promised never to stop offering a specific model, or even replace it with an update, at which point, I assume, everybody in the room started clapping, and they saluted Sam Altman and said, "Thank you, sir, for making this happen."

• 4:28Ed Zitron?

  And by the way, what I'm suggesting is that no one's ever done this, or like, one freak did, or maybe Altman emailed it to himself. Dude, just shut up. Just, your company burns...

• 4:39Ed Zitron?

  Five billion dollars a year and the best you've got is this warmed up dog shit about people marine todding you over your model and never taking it away. What has OpenAI ever even taken away a model? Jesus fucking Christ. These company. Anyway, a few days later, Altman posted a conversation where he asked GPT 4.5 if it believed it was real, leading to a series of bullet points with things like, what do we mean by real? Only for GPT 4.5 saying that it believed that it was not an independent consciousness, but rather a structured experience happening within your consciousness, referring to Sam Altman, which is the kind of shit that's only impressive if you're an imbecile or so stoned you've texted eight of your friends the question, what if the Joker was Batman? And by the way, the answer to that is called The Batman Who Laughs, and it's one of the

• 5:24Ed Zitron?

  worst comics ever written. If you want to talk to me about DC metal, please email me at EZ, that's E Z or Z if you're Canadian or British, at betteroffline.com. I really, if you are working for DC Comics right now and you had anything to do with death metal or The Batman Who Laughs, you and I have a grievance. You and I need to talk. Sorry, what? This is a tech pop box room. Right, back to OpenAI. More worryingly, Sam Altman posted an idea for paid plans where your $20 plus subscription converts the credits you can use across features like deep research, O1, GPT 4.5, Sora, and so on, with no fixed limits per feature, and you choose what you want. If you run out of credits, you can

• 6:05Ed Zitron?

  buy more. This, to be clear, is an attempt to raise prices without actually raising them by attempting to limit usage of OpenAI's more expensive models. ChatGPT Plus and other subscriptions give you a limit, for example, a limit of 80 messages every three hours on GPT 4.0, but using one doesn't limit your use of other products. Here, OpenAI is trying to create a rent-seeking model where power users have to pay for more credits if they want to use, say, OpenAI's more expensive models like Sora and O1. And I imagine any situation like this will be one where they hope that people simply won't use their credits or overuse them and have to pay for top-ups. This is, of course, all theoretical, but it heavily suggests that OpenAI is getting desperate. And now the information is reporting that OpenAI executives have told some investors that they will be

• 6:49Ed Zitron?

  charging $2,000 per month for their low-end agent product. And yes, that's a quote.

• 6:56Ed Zitron?

  Sold to, and again I quote, "high-income knowledge workers with supposed mid-tier agents for software development costing possibly $10,000 a month, with supposed PhD-level research agents costing $20,000 a month." And I will tell you, the PhDs I know would probably do it for half. And they'd even work for an annoying asshole like Sam Altman. Now, you may wonder what any of these things do, and the answer is that neither I nor the information know. As of right now, the only operational agent OpenAI has is Operator, OpenAI's agent that sometimes successfully uses a web browser to search for something in minutes, which would usually take you seconds. The information attempted to suggest that the $2,000 a month agent would be some sort

• 7:37Ed Zitron?

  of thing that could sort through and rank sales lead, but I'm sorry, do I really have to read this shit with a straight face? $20,000 for a PhD-level agent? What the fuck does that mean? What would it do? Why do these companies... I get emails every week having to justify my fucking cynicism, but these shitheads, they're allowed to just make up stuff and leak it to the information, the information publishes it, we're all meant to be impressed. What the fucking... What the fuck? I...I'm allowed to rant on these, they're allowing me to rant on these. It's just, it sickens me. I have had this week at least five people email me and be like, "Well, Ed, what would it take to change your mind about this stuff?" Why do I have to fucking do it? Why do I...

• 8:19Ed Zitron?

  The multi-billion-dollar companies do a dogshit job of actually explaining this stuff or selling it. They lose billions of dollars, but I'm the guy who has to justify myself? Oh, well, I'll keep doing it. Nevertheless, nestled at the bottom of this article is a far more obvious pale horse. OpenAI is planning to charge 20% to 30% of pro customers, the $200 a month subscription that loses them money every time, a higher price because of how many research queries they're doing, with Altman, according to the information, suggesting some sort of, "Hahay, guess what, à la carte or pay-as-you-go approach." I want to be clear about something. This is not a company that's cooking. This is not a company that's worked out anything. OpenAI is unprofitable, unsustainable, and deeply, deeply lost.

• 9:02Ed Zitron?

  These are the actions of a desperate company run by a desperate man. If only Sam Altman had a thoughtful friend to talk about all these problems too.

• 9:19Speaker 01

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• 10:23Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.