[Avshalom]

>>This is clearly the case ... probably

>>OpenAI would be incredibly profitable if they could live off the profit from improved inference efficiency on a GPT4 level model!

If gpt4 was basically free money at this point it's real weird that their first instinct was to cut it off after gpt5

[steveklabnik]

> If gpt4 was basically free money at this point it's real weird that their first instinct was to cut it off after gpt5

People find the UX of choosing a model very confusing, the idea with 5 is that it would route things appropriately and so eliminate this confusion. That was the motivation for removing 4. But people were upset enough that they decided to bring it back for a while, at least.

[solarkraft]

They picked the worst possible time to make the change if money wasn’t involved (which is why I assumed GPT-5 must be massively cheaper to run). The backlash from being forced to use it cost a fair bit of the model’s reputation.

[steveklabnik]

Yeah it didnt work out for them, for sure.

[dcre]

I think the idea here is that gpt-5-mini is the cheap gpt-4 quality model they want to serve and make money on.