In about 2 weeks since OpenAI launched their $200/mo version of Deep Research, it has already been open sourced within 24 hours (Hugging Face) and now being offered for free by Perplexity. The pace of disruption is mind boggling and makes you wonder if OpenAI has any moats left.
My interest was piqued and I’ve been trying ChatGPT Pro for the last week. It’s interesting and the deep research did a pretty good job of outlining a strategy for a very niche multiplayer turn based game I’ve been playing. But this article reminded me to change next month’s subscription back to the premium $20 subscription.
Luckily work just gave me access to ChatGPT Enterprise and O1 Pro absolutely smoked a really hard problem I had at work yesterday, that would have taken me hours or maybe days of research and trawling through documentation to figure out without it explaining it to me.
Authorization policy vs authorization filters in a .NET API. It’s not something I’ve used before and wanted permissive policies (the db to check if you have OR permissions vs AND) and just attaching attributes so the dev can see at a glance what lets you use this endpoint.
It’s a well documented Microsoft process but I didn’t even know where to begin as it’s something I hadn’t used before. I gave it the authorization policy (which was AND logic, and was async so it’d reject it any of them failed) said “how can I have this support lots of attributes” and it just straight up wrote the authorization filter for me. Ran a few tests and it worked.
I know this is basic stuff to some people but boy it made life easier.
As a current OpenAI subscriber (just the regular $20/mo plan), I'm happy to not spend the effort switching as long as they stay within a few negligible percent of the State of the Art.
I tried DeepSeek, it's fine, had some downtime, whatever, I'll just stick with 4o. Claude is also fine, not noticeably better to the point where I care to switch. OAI has my chat history which is worth something I suppose - maybe a week of effort of re-doing prompts and chats on certain projects.
That being said, my barrier to switching isn't that high, if they ever stop being close-to-tied for first, or decide to raise their prices, I'll gladly cancel.
I like their API as well as a developer, but it seems like other competitors are mostly copying that too, so again not a huge reason to stick with em.
But hey, inertia and keeping pace with the competition, is enough to keep me as a happy customer for now.
>I like their API as well as a developer, but it seems like other competitors are mostly copying that too, so again not a huge reason to stick with em.
You can also use tools like litellm and openrouter to abstract away choice of API
I've had a coding project where I actually preferred 4o outputs to DeepSeek R1, though it was a bit of a niche use case (long script to parse DOM output of web pages).
Also they just updated 4o recently, it's even better now. o3-mini-high is solid as well, I try it when 4o fails.
One issue I have with most models is that when they're re-writing my long scripts, they tend to forget to keep a few lines or variables here or there. Makes for some really frustrating debugging. o1 has actually been pretty decent here so far. I'm definitely a bit of a power user, I really try to push the models to do as much as possible regarding long software contexts.
