[charcircuit]

>The competition is between openai and anthropic

In capitalism there are many many competitions going on at the same time. Both models can compete and inference providers can compete for costs.

In your apple example if at the same stores you saw "open" apples having different prices and having sales you might question if the costs of those frontier apples are not being manipulated.

[vikramkr]

Yeah there's a brand premium. Like literally with apples the ones with trademarked names can cost more. And the ones with trademarked names have an organization behind them that promote that apple variety and set fees etc for growing and selling those apples. And customers are willing to pay more because those apples usually taste way better (the group exists to stop growers from enshittifying the apple by selecting for yield over flavor like what happened to honey crisp). Those prices are being "manipulated" but that's not criminal behavior - it's not illegal and wouldn't make sense to try and make illegal. The frontier models also do have different coats and have "sales" (for personal plans, the amount of usage you can get on the 200 dollar plans is orders of magnitude more than you could get for a similar cost for any open model - you'd need the same capability at the same token efficiency at literally 1/40th the cost to be able to be cheaper) - to the extent that if there is illegal stuff going on it seems more likely to me that it's on the category of dumping/pricing unreasonably low to kill competitors in some anti-competitive way (though as I understand it it's not something courts tend to find as illegal) instead of price fixing