Thread

1. kingstnap · 1786044681 · focus · HN ↗

   Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate why they are doing this.

   Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.

   They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.

   Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.

   I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.

   1. ToValueFunfetti · 1786045448 · focus · HN ↗

      Is this new behavior from them? I haven't looked at their free chat offering in a minute, but I thought they always had them close behind paid tier, often with essentially equal products that made it weird for them to sell the paid tier for chat.

      1. mkozlows · 1786045631 · focus · HN ↗

         No, free tier was total garbage with GPT-5.
      2. kingstnap · 1786046333 · focus · HN ↗

         You can't even pick 5.6 luna on the chat app with a paid subscription. It just gives you sol (or use older models) with what seems like basically as much usage as you want. And sol is considerably smarter than luna.

         All of this is of pretty minor importance though. You can't read as many tokens as a subcription can produce so more chat is not the value add nor super important.

         I mean there are literally so many providers for free chat if you are willing to use several seperate apps.

         The real value in these subs is using codex cli, much like the real point of anthropic subs is using claude code. Because agentic work actually does require a lot of tokens.

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