The price is obviously 15-30x that of 4o, but I'd just posit that there are some use cases where it may make sense. It probably doesn't make sense for the "open-ended consumer facing chatbot" use case, but for other use cases that are fewer and higher value in nature, it could if it's abilities are considerably better than 4o.
For example, there are now a bunch of vendors that sell "respond to RFP" AI products. The number of RFPs that any sales organization responds to is probably no more than a couple a week, but it's a very time-consuming, laborious process. But the payoff is obviously very high if a response results in a closed sale. So here paying 30x for marginally better performance makes perfect sense.
I can think of a number of similar "high value, relatively low occurrence" use cases like this where the pricing may not be a big hindrance.
Complete legal arguments as well. If I was an attorney, I'd love to have a sophisticated LLM write my crib notes for anything I might do or say in the court room, or even the complete direction that I'd take my case. For some cases, that'd be worth almost any price.
Esp. when they aren't even sure whether they will commit to offering this long term? Who would be insane enough to build a product on top of something that may not be there tomorrow?
Those products require some extensive work, such a model finetuning on proprietary data. Who is going to invest time & money into something like that when OpenAI says right out of the gate they may not support this model for very long?
Basically OpenAI is telegraphing that this is yet another prototype that escaped a lab, not something that is actually ready for use and deployment.
We’re one of those types of customers. We wrote an OpenAI API compatible gateway that automatically batches stuff for us, so we get 50% off for basically no extra dev work in our client applications.
I don’t care about speed, I care about getting the right answer. The cost is fine as long as the output generates us more profit.
For example, there are now a bunch of vendors that sell "respond to RFP" AI products. The number of RFPs that any sales organization responds to is probably no more than a couple a week, but it's a very time-consuming, laborious process. But the payoff is obviously very high if a response results in a closed sale. So here paying 30x for marginally better performance makes perfect sense.
I can think of a number of similar "high value, relatively low occurrence" use cases like this where the pricing may not be a big hindrance.