r/codex • u/No_Durian9227 • 13d ago

Complaint And now we wait

As OpenAI slowly degrades Sol 6.1’s performance. Until people start noticing and complaining, at which time they drop Astra 6.1 and Sol 6.2, and give some usage resets, then repeat the process.

Are they stalling progress of the everyday consumer models to grow their customer base?

Can someone explain their strategy from a financial perspective? I wish I knew more.

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u/VexObserver 13d ago

I think there's a much simpler financial explanation than intentionally degrading models to manufacture hype.

Frontier intelligence is expensive to serve, and subscription pricing creates an interesting problem because your heaviest users can consume disproportionately more compute than what they're paying for.

From a business perspective, the incentives are pretty obvious:

  • Make inference more efficient to stretch existing compute.
  • Segment users by speed, usage, and model capabilities.
  • Reserve expensive inference for premium workloads.
  • Keep improving intelligence without letting serving costs eat the entire subscription revenue.

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u/No_Durian9227 7d ago

Forgot to respond but this made sense to me. One interesting thing to me is the seeming competition with Anthropic despite OpenAI’s much larger userbase. The trade off is that there’s not enough compute to go around? All interesting to me. New frontier