Unfortunately I think the lesson they took from Anthropic is that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents, and they'll happily pay any amount for even small benefits.
If I put on my schizo hat. Something they might be doing is increasing the losses on their monthly codex subscriptions, to show that the API has a higher margin than before (the codex account massively in the negative, but the API account now having huge margins).
I've never seen an OpenAI investor pitch deck. But my guess is that API margins is one of the big ones they try to sell people on since Sama talks about it on Twitter.
I would be interested in hearing the insider stuff. Like if this model is genuinely like twice as expensive to serve or something.
Additionally, the value generated by the best models with high-thinking and lots of context window is way higher than the cheap and tiny models, so you need to provide a "gateway drug" that lets people experience the best you offer.
On the other hand I would argue that most workers' salaries are more like subscriptions than API type pricing (which would be more like an hourly contractor)
This is also true for the humans. They will need to provide more benefits than the coding agents cost.
You sound like elon with the fsd will be here next year. Many cars have the self driving feature - most drivers don’t use it. Oh why is that I wonder.
If they can show that people will pay a lot for somewhat better performance, it raises the value of any performance lead they can maintain.
If they demonstrate that and high switching costs, their franchise is worth scary amounts of money.
[1]https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14499v1 *Source is from March 2025 so make of it what you will.
An alternative perspective is, devs highly value coding agents, and are willing to pay more because they're so useful. In other words, the market value of this limited resource is being adjusted to be closer to reality.
Inference is not free, so all providers have a financial limit, and all providers have limited GPU/memory, so there's a physical material limit.
I suggest looking at the profits of these companies (while they scramble to stay competitive).
It will get faster, but there are no singularities in the real world. Except possibly black holes, but we can't even be sure of that.
sounds like criminal fraud to me tbh
>For API developers, gpt-5.5 will soon be available in the Responses and Chat Completions APIs at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with a 1M context window.
That's more about managers who hope AI will gradually replace stubborn and lazy devs. That will shift the balance to business ideas and connections out of technical side and investments.
Anyway, before singularity there going to be a huge change.