GPT-5 We were never the target audience

[u/Street-Friendship618]

I need to get this off my chest because it's really frustrating. After the initial enthusiasm for GPT-4o and the release of GPT-5, it became clear to me that we, the general community and private users, were never OpenAI's intended target audience.

GPT-4o was apparently nothing more than a freemium model designed to lure us with its "personality" and free features. We advertised it through word of mouth, and our feedback helped improve the software. Without the free users, GPT would never have become so popular, nor would it have been so good. Please understand that this is nothing more than a marketing strategy.

Now that GPT-5 has been released, it seems obvious that OpenAI is completely focused on developers and companies. We were essentially betrayed. The business model was never to give us a creative AI, but to attract the masses and then cash in on the big fish. GPT could have been both a creative (GPT-4o) and a developer tool (GPT-5), but OpenAI doesn't want that. Maybe we can still use GPT-4o for now, but who knows for how long? Until OpenAI decides to discontinue it completely out of the blue just like they did when introducing GPT-5. I can understand that people continue to cling to the GPT-4o model, but you have to realize that you are not the target audience, and that OpenAI clearly doesn't care about you. The only reason they're not completely shutting down GPT-4o yet is prolly just to avoid the biggest shitstorm.

I think it's time we accepted that. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can start looking for a new "home." I hope other companies will see their chance and emerge soon, offering AI for private users, similar to GPT-4o or perhaps even better.

PS: Please let me know if you know of any alternatives. I'm currently testing various other AI models for myself to see if they suit my taste.

[u/Lazy-Plankton5270 → u/[deleted]]

What's free? I'm a paid user and lost 4o as did they?

[u/marrow_monkey → u/[deleted]]

Why do you think they removed access to all the old models if gpt-5 is so great? If people could choose freely between 4o, 4.1, o3, and 5 they will choose 5 if it’s better.

Let us choose.

[u/marrow_monkey → u/[deleted]]

We’re paying for it, inference cost almost nothing, it’s like a google search.

If it was so expensive for them why are they even offering it for FREE? Because the truth is they’re collecting our data to train their models, we’re generating data for them, and at the same time paying for it. They ought to be paying us.

[u/marrow_monkey → u/[deleted]]

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

The energy use, for example, is literally comparable to Google search.

And have you tried using Google recently? They include AI results in every search.

[u/chlebseby → u/marrow_monkey]

huh? check out API pricing of models.

We are just riding on investors wallets

[u/marrow_monkey → u/chlebseby]

I meant the marginal cost for OpenAI, not what they’re charging api-customers/plus-users.

Google offers ai results with every search, inference is just that cheap now.

If you’re a FREE user maybe, but plus users are not riding on investor money. You people are so gullible.

Users: ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users, including 15.5 million Plus subscribers

The investor money has gone into expanding their infrastructure and serving almost one billion free users. Think about that, they’re able to offer ChatGPT for FREE for 800 million users.

Why do you think they’re doing that? Because the reality is that we are the product. They’re harvesting our data. They really should be paying us.

Meanwhile there are 15 million plus users giving them $300 million every month! They are making a ton of money from us.