Possibly. I don't know.
It could be unfeasible to increase prices so much whenever a new model was released.
Any assumption made here is based on vibes. I see no reason to drop my skepticism.
> Its easier to just admit that technological advances helped decrease the cost instead of coming up with more complicated reasons like VC funding, subsidies and so on.
They raised an absurd amount of cash, and still bleed money to an absurd degree.
VCs make money when they exit. OpenAI only needs to "make sense" until an IPO happens. Once private investors have their exit, the markets can be left to handle the resulting dumpster fire.
> For instance take Deepseek and other opensource models - even they have reduced their costs by a huge margin.
Chinese companies are very opaque. I don't pretend to have insight into it.
Is the company behind Deepseek profitable?
> What explanation is there for opensource models?
What opensource models have to do with inference?
Your argument is that training is expensive but inference is cheap (something I see no evidence of). Why would a company give away the expensive part of the work?