Allie K. Miller

OpenAI just announced the $200 Pro plan is back but with half the total API spend included, offset by some of their smaller (NOT Astra!) getting a 50% price drop. Does this impact the average user? No. Recent superusers? Yes. Why? Astra usage. We are still VERY much in a compute-constrained world, and here are the clues that point to that. When many of these start changing (in a year, in two decades, who knows), you can assume we’re moving out of a compute-constrained world. Until then, tokenomics matter. CLUES: - limits on new subscribers at higher tier subscriptions - usage limits by window or week - techies talking about the future promise of abundance (aka it’s not here yet) - model-specific limitations (like fable) - slower responses from models - default medium thinking - default automode - autorouting to smaller models - CEOs tweeting “our GPUs are melting” - free tier users not getting frontier models - labs signing big energy deals - efficiency breakthroughs like deepseek moving markets (Nvidia saw a big drop, remember?) - hundreds of billions of dollars in future compute commits from both Anthropic and OpenAI - labs literally saying they’re compute-constrained - not seeing “unlimited” allowances everywhere - hearing about GPU shortages at cloud providers Also, dropping the hammer on usage right before a ton of (likely great) press coverage - smart timing - even if the artificially inflated API price idea sounds like a strawman.