We're now at the end of the year and neither Google nor Anthropic nor any single other LLM provider does this. OpenAI does this because their CEO is SamA. That's it.
Don’t underestimate the volume of useful idiots.
What ID would we provide?
Would we pick some random employee to attach to the account?
What relevance does this have to the notion of “piercing the corporate veil” if a business account is tied to someone’s drivers license?
I place the blame for this situation squarely on the careless and thoughtless user population who have blindly provided their phone numbers and now ID scans to any old random, fly by night, start up who request them.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...
And that credits are nonrefundable:
https://openai.com/policies/service-credit-terms/
It absolutely seems like terrible horrible customer service not to issue refunds in this case. Obviously the credits can still be used for most of the models, so it's not like you can't do anything with them. But if someone explains they bought the credits specifically to use with the verification-gated models and then discovered they couldn't (since apparently verification fails for some people), there's no question that refunds are the right thing to do. What is OpenAI thinking?
(BTW, speculation seems to be that the verification process doesn't have anything to do with know-your-customer laws or anti-fraud, but is intended to prevent competitors like Chinese DeepSeek from having large-scale access to OpenAI's best models.)
It's not because OpenAI's CEO is also the founder of WorldCoin, a project to ID everyone?
Most European countries have consumer protection agencies with teeth, and a company cannot decide on their own what they refund or not.
Not sure why people see their phone number as something private?
FWIW, I've heard some people saying they avoid it because of spam, I've been on my local anti-spam list since I got my current phone number, and receive about 1 spam call every week or something. Maybe there is one for where you live too.
I command a significant budget and even with a lot of effort to not proliferate my phone number, I get at least half a dozen spam or sales calls a day. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I didn't attempt to protect it. Perhaps it would be the same and I should just give up, but I'm not willing to try.
The other side of the coin is that it's just none of their business. They don't need my phone number to sell me SaaS software. There is no upside for me to give it to them.
I don't think so, I've had friends and acquaintances that had the same issue as you, multiple spam calls per day. I helped them add themselves to their national list, and after a month or two the constant spamming stops.
I think you might just be unlucky living in country that doesn't have such list that works OK. I've lived in multiple different countries so far in my life, and it's been the same thing in all of them, adding myself to the list eventually makes the spam stop.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but where on either ChatGPT or the API platform OpenAI hosts are you seeing ads?
Parent is comparing OpenAI to other companies that followed a similar trajectory of enshittification.
For now I am happy enough with Gemini and GPT-5 because my usage is so lite that anything is cheap. For many engineering use cases, Gemini-2.5-flash-lite works well enough.
How do you use GLM? With codex —oss? Or, just ‘raw’ with no agent-wrapping coding environment?
[1] https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude [2] https://docs.unsloth.ai/models/glm-4.6-how-to-run-locally
link ?
„ These days, when entrepreneurs pitch at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, there’s a high chance their startups are running on Chinese models. “I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model,” notes Martin Casado, a partner at a16z.“ —- https://ixbroker.com/blog/china-is-quietly-overtaking-americ...
It fairly accurately measured my age, location, place of birth and political inclinations based on our conversations alone. I am certain it can infer a lot more.
There is no other reason to require KYC for a server-side text transformation tool, no matter how impressive it is.
And another could be EU requirements for age verification. AI can produce adult content.
There are may be other reasons, like to prevent using OAI models' output to train competing models.
They should realize that anything can produce adult content. Anything.
Anyways, competitors do not require KYC for text transformation services, and that's how it should be.
So I don't think implementation costs are an obstacle.
Because then the NSA shows up with an NSL, you integrate with the fascist surveillance state or you lose your business. How have people forgotten this so fucking quickly?
It's easier to get a partial response for something like a CBRN topic
When did you last check?
But that's okay. There are plenty of other models. Perhaps not bleeding edge great, but great nevertheless.
Alas, on my Social Security mandated USDirectExpress card it requires hours to start the process through 3 levels by phone, then documentation that the vendor refused to process a reimbursement, then a physical form received and returned by US Postal Service within 10 calendar days. Everything changed last year when the outgoing administration changed the rules and chose a new bank as the provider for Social Security payments.
Deepseek is nowhere close to OpenAI in terms of coding ability.
And the fact that it will just cut the API if you ask anything that might be considered taboo in China... I just don't see the draw.
Cheap, sure! It's definitely that!
Of course, you can go further and run qwen locally. Or even train your own nanogpt. Why not if it's capable, right? And this 'if' is a big question.
If you use open webui(I recommend via docker) you can access your ollama hosted model via the browser on any device on your network. Tailscale will help make that accessible remotely.
I'm currently working on an open source long term memory system designed to work with ollama to help local models be more competitive with the big players, so we are not so beholden to these big companies.
https://community.openai.com/t/api-credits-amount-get-expire...
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Even then, it’s nonsensical to think that you’re going to “starve” these companies of revenue, companies that are growing faster than any in history, bringing in trillions in revenue, and have appreciable fractions of our entire species using them daily.