Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
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sspwa4 about 3 hours ago 120 comments
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In case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week. Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less.
Discussion (120 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Now, let's see how the Anthropic IPO goes.
I wouldn't be surprised if every $10 you add to the subscription cost halves your audience.
For ChatGPT I really only see two customer groups, pro-consumer and small and medium enterprise. The entry level are just going to use Google/Gemini for the most part, or some ad supported ChatGPT tier. There's no price low enough to make the entry level, average consumer pay for an AI service. These are people who will not pay for search, email and social media. They only pay for streaming because there's no way around it.
I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.
Their goal is to create AGI and replace humans with something resembling the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel but more extreme.
I definitely see the pricing model. I can afford $100, maybe $200, but not $3000.
I've said this countless times already; if OpenAI or Anthropic were serious about world domination they would offer an infinite $500 to $1000/month tier subscription. No limits; eat as much as you'd like buffet. Maybe limit concurrent connection (say 10 conns max in parallel) to limit abuse. This would actually allow regular users to run 24/7 agentic loops, massively speeding up deployment. Win win for everyone.
Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.
I'm now hitting the session limits which means I can either purchase another plan, upgrade, or move off of Codex.
People have a fair chance to learn resource management in 5 hour chunks, while not being limited to silly models, and burning through all tokens in the first hour of the week. Seems mostly good.
What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.
People want things to be better more than they want things to not change. That's a good thing!
On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.
Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.
Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.
Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.
Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.
Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.
I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.
"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?
It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options
I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.
A better approach if they want to balance the load is having higher usage or lower usage consumption at different times of day.
The 5h limit hurts the most on the $20 plan because the limit is already very small (5h is ~15% of your weekly).
When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.
The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.
That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.
When you haven't used any tokens for an extended amount of time it reverts to the point where whenever you send your first token is when the window begins.
I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary
As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.
Having just the weekly limit meant I could blow through too much within the first couple of days. Fortunately, resets were raining down during that time.
(I know I could just vibe code a tracker that splits up my usage into arbitrary periods and lets me know when to take a break. Maybe if they remove the 5-hour limit again.)
I've had few weekends where I spend the full week credits over night then have nothing to do for a week