alt Hacker News> 5x is calculated in terms of API costs, nobody pays those extreme Anthropic prices outside enterprise users.
Ignore value then. Anthropic still provides about 3x as many raw tokens. The 20x\200 plans provide about 10B for openai versus almost 30B for Anthropic.
Do you really think that Opus uses 3x as many tokens as Sol per task? I don't.
> Most users aren't on their $200 plan.
Fair enough. I should have said most heavy users.
> Most users (including on the $200 plan) continue being subsidized.
They continue to be fifty percent less subsidized, I guess.
Look, I don't fault them for trying to become profitable. I fault them for the weird weaselly business speak about cost per task. It's BS game playing and we all know it.
I'm honestly rooting for them, and hope it all works out. For now though I'm pretty salty that my bill jumped by 150% in one month. Gaslighting about made up metrics just makes me more angry.
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People in HN live in a bubble. Plenty of real world use cannot use subscription plans (not even talking about enterprise agentic use) and is absolutely at the mercy of the cost per task metric.
We agonize over cost per task to the extreme for services/functionality built atop of APIs and can absolutely guarantee you that it is the real world metric that counts most right after “is the model good enough for the task at hand,” and furthermore that, yes, in fact, it is quite often that we see certain models/providers easily using 3x or more tokens on average for the same tasks (or even the exact same task) than a supposedly similarly matched model from another provider. Once you become intimately familiar with the thinking traces from specific models, you can preempt this to some extent with manipulations to the system prompt (essentially heading off entire thinking branches) but the nuking of reasoning traces in the name of preventing against distillation attacks has made this harder.
How do you know? Have you done the A/B test yourself?
> Do you really think that Opus uses 3x as many tokens as Sol per task? I don't.
You don’t have to speculate. Pull up artificial analysis, pick either opus or sol and scroll down to total tokens and to total price. Opus (and sonnet) use 4x the tokens and 7x the dollars.
That difference alone removes the difference that semi analysis found.