“Right now, I do not believe that there are companies that are stymied by the pricing that OpenAI and their ilk offer, nor do I think there are many companies or use cases that don’t exist because Large Language Models are too expensive.”
Our reading, the sentence that was checked:
Right now he does not believe any companies are stymied by the pricing of OpenAI and similar firms, nor that there are many companies or use cases that don't exist because LLMs are too expensive.
Assessment: Unresolved Evidence as of
Where and when Ed Zitron wrote it
Where's Your Ed At, Deep Impact, paragraph 120.
- Said
- Source observed
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence as of
- the cutoff for this assessment
- Assessment recorded
- assessment wyea-deep-impact-17d37f-a2
We recorded 50 claims from this post. See every claim from this post.
The wording above is the version this site observed on 2026-10-28. The source may have been edited after 2025-01-29. This page does not claim the wording was captured then.
What the claim commits to
- Kind
- Observation
- Deadline, as the speaker wrote it
- None stated. This site does not add one.
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Deadline state on 2026-10-29
- No horizon (the release’s reference date)
Conditions
- right now (qualifier, stated by the speaker)
- I do not believe / I think (qualifier, stated by the speaker)
- not many companies or use cases (scope, stated by the speaker)
From the speaker
- Right now
- I do not believe
- companies that are stymied by the pricing that OpenAI and their ilk offer
- nor do I think there are many companies or use cases
- because Large Language Models are too expensive
Our interpretation
- Treat the belief language as a qualified factual assessment, not a claim about his private mental state.
- The ordinary reading is that commercial LLM prices were not blocking companies from deploying otherwise useful applications.
- Stymied includes a deployment materially delayed, abandoned or restricted because of model prices; it need not mean the entire company ceased operating.
- Use January 1–29, 2025 as the current observation month through publication.
- Do not equate integration, training or governance costs with prices charged by model providers.
- No numerical meaning is assigned to 'many'.
Counts as supported if: Contemporary evidence that commercially plausible deployments were not materially blocked by model-provider prices, with sufficiently broad coverage to support the market-level assessment.
Counts as contradicted if: A documented company deployment blocked by contemporary model-provider prices contradicts the first clause. Establishing that many companies or use cases were blocked additionally requires evidence of prevalence.
Retrospective: these criteria were written after the outcome was public.
Current assessment
Was it true for the period described?
Outcome: Unresolved
The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it.
Scored on a plain reading. The speaker named no measure for this claim, so it was judged on the reading an informed reader would take, stated below under our interpretation. Both reviews had to find that reading fair.
- Evidence as of
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Assessment recorded
- Policy version
- 2026-10-28.7
Rationale
IDC's October 2024 survey, reported on January 21, 2025, found that 33% of surveyed IT executives cited high adoption costs as a significant barrier, but it did not isolate model-provider prices [e1]. Semafor's January 5, 2024 report described customers choosing alternatives to GPT-4 because of price or speed [e2]. Neither item establishes a deployment blocked by provider prices during January 1–29, 2025, the broad absence of such barriers, or how common they were [e1, e2].
Limitations
- Both underlying observations predate the target period [e1, e2].
- Broad adoption-cost concerns do not identify a deployment blocked by model charges [e1].
- The model-selection report does not separate price from speed or establish that deployments were blocked [e2].
- A single qualifying counterexample would address the no-company clause but would not establish prevalence.
Evidence (2 items)
Context only: IDC research manager Mona Liddell, writing in CIO,
a significant barrier.
Why it matters here: The survey establishes reported adoption-cost concerns before the post. It neither isolates model-provider pricing nor measures January 2025 decisions.
- Publisher
- IDC research manager Mona Liddell, writing in CIO
- Kind of source
- Independent measurement
- Describes events of
- Public from
Context only: Semafor,
too expensive or slow.
Why it matters here: This is reputable reporting of earlier price-sensitive model selection, used because no underlying customer records were supplied. Switching models is not necessarily a blocked deployment, and the period predates the claim.
- Publisher
- Semafor
- Kind of source
- News report
- Describes events of
- Public from
What would settle it
Records of January 1–29, 2025 deployment decisions identifying applicable model prices and whether those charges caused delay, abandonment or restricted use. A qualifying example would refute the no-company clause; representative market evidence would be needed to assess the broad absence claim and the separate prevalence clause.
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the sources this register covers.
: Where's Your Ed At, Deep Impact
Right now, I do not believe that there are companies that are stymied by the pricing that OpenAI and their ilk offer, nor do I think there are many companies or use cases that don’t exist because Large Language Models are too expensive.
- Where
- paragraph 120
- Published
- 2025-01-29
- Source observed
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Assessment versions
- Assessment wyea-deep-impact-17d37f-a2: Current. Outcome: Unresolved. Evidence as of 2026-10-28. Public date not recorded.
Recorded events
Assessment publishedBy this site
First assessment published after both reviews and the final-text check passed.