Looks like we're about to add another item to Masayoshi Son's list of SoftBank funding failures. OpenAI just released the next version of their flagship LLM, and the pricing is absolutely mind-boggling.

GPT-4.5 vs GPT-4o:

• Performance: Barely any meaningful improvement

• Price: 15x more expensive than GPT-4o

• Benchmark position: Still behind DeepSeek R1 and qwq32B

But wait, it gets worse. The new o1-Pro API costs a staggering $600 per million tokens - that's 300x the price of DeepSeek R1, which is already confirmed to be a 671B parameter model.

What exactly is Sam Altman thinking? Two years have passed since the original GPT-4 release, and what do we have to show for it?

All GPT-4.5 feels like is just a bigger, slightly smarter version of the same 2023 model architecture - certainly nothing that justifies a 15x price hike. We're supposed to be witnessing next-gen model improvements continuing the race to AGI, not just throwing more parameters at the same approach and jacking up prices.

After the original GPT-4 team left OpenAI, it seems they've accomplished little in actually improving the core model. Meanwhile:

• Google is making serious progress with Gemini 2.0 Flash

• DeepSeek is delivering better performance at a fraction of the cost

• Claude continues to excel in many areas

Is OpenAI's strategy just "throw more computing at the problem and see what happens"? What's next? Ban DeepSeek? Raise $600B? Build nuclear plants to power even bigger models?

Don't be shocked when o3/GPT-5 costs $10k per API call and still lags behind Claude 4 in most benchmarks. Yes, OpenAI leads in some coding benchmarks, but many of us are using Claude for agent coding anyway.

TL;DR: OpenAI's new models cost 15-300x more than competitors with minimal performance improvements. The company that once led the AI revolution now seems to be burning investor money while competitors innovate more efficiently.