Casey Newton

And so kind of just trust us on that is sort of one camp.

And then there are the sort of, you know, the number crunchers who are trying to fit all of this into a kind of financial projection that will make sense to investors who are not as convinced that the world is about to change forever and who want to see things like, what is your plan for actually making the revenue that you're going to need to pay for all this stuff?

So

I think this is happening in a way at OpenAI that is now, because of Berber's story, is out there.

But I think this kind of tension exists at all of the big AI companies.

And so I think right now what we're seeing is kind of that power struggle breaking out into the open.

Yeah, and I think one thing I want to flag on this is that these growth projections that OpenAI reportedly did not hit, those were in 2025.

I think it is fair to wonder if something has changed in just the last few months because of the enormous rapid growth of tools like Codex and Cloud Code.

We have seen just reports of

astronomical growth in those tools.

It may be that OpenAI was having some growth issues late last year, but that because of this agentic coding boom, things have started to turn around.

We just don't know yet.

Yeah.

I think what's happening here is that the market is essentially splitting into two.

There's the casual hobby users who are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, like Cloud for souped up Google queries to help them write e-mails and maybe only using it a couple of times a day.

And if you're doing that, you probably don't want to pay $20 a month.

You're probably more comfortable paying $8 a month, or maybe you don't want to pay anything at all, and you'd just rather use the free ad-supported tier of all of this stuff.

And then there's the professional users for whom this is worth way more than $20 a month and who are willing to pay many multiples of that to get the access to the latest models, to have higher rate limits.

And so I think all of the companies now are sort of...

you know, doing this kind of experimentation with how much can we charge the professional users without losing them to a rival company and how cheap can we make the kind of lower-end subscriptions or the free tiers so that people who are more casual users won't be tempted to go use Google instead.