> Maybe it’s the realization that it was never that cheap in the first place and they're forcing us to upgrade in a slow and painful way.

All the analysis I have seen points to frontier models being profitable to serve. It’s using 50% or more of your GPUs for research plus CapEx for capacity expansion that makes these businesses so heavily cash-negative.

What you are observing is downstream of another detail. It gets more expensive to serve a model as utilization goes down. Plus the opportunity cost vs newer, more-profitable models.

There are plenty of valid reasons to critique here. “OpenAI is lying about this being a sustainable price to serve” is not one of them.