Leadership at this crop of tech companies is more like followership. Whether it's 'no politics', or sudden layoffs, or 'founder mode', or 'work from home'... one CEO has an idea and three dozen other CEOs unthinkingly adopt it.
Several comments in this thread have used Anthropic's lower pricing as a criticism, but it's probably moot: a month from now Anthropic will release its own $200 model.
This is just pricing the same model to higher limits at a volume discount (which makes the pricing per usage lower, not higher). To actually "release a $200 model" they'd have to make something expensive to run like a ChatGPT 4.5 and then have the only plan which can use it worth a damn be that price. Given how bad 4.5 flopped in terms of performance I doubt many will go that route though, it'd have to be different kinds of services not in the current plan instead.
o1-pro (and high limit Deep Research) is technically the $200/mon offering. 4.5 is kind of a dud IMO, even in creative uses. That said gemini-2.5-pro is nearly as good if not better than o1-pro and now that Gemini has a Deep Research equivalent I'm finding it hard to justify the $200/mon sub.
