TL;DR: OpenAI is weighing a hefty price cut on tokens, according to a new Wall Street Journal report—a move that it expects Anthropic to mirror, as both head into IPOs whose sky-high valuations demand serious justification. The AI price wars could be a high-stakes test of which lab has dug the best moat—and whether customers care which AI brand and model they use or just want whatever gets the job done at the cheapest price.

What happened: How deep a markdown we’re talking about is unclear, but CEO Sam Altman recently called AI costs “a huge issue” and promised “more value for less spend.” This report comes just days after OpenAI announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO (a week after Anthropic did the same). These long-feuding rivals are both seeking trillion-dollar valuations.

OpenAI’s gambit seems to be to lock in more customers than Anthropic as users wince at AI’s rising costs. In April, Anthropic passed OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, and its latest funding round vaulted its valuation past OpenAI’s. The ChatGPT maker is now giving chase, and its CFO expects enterprise to make up about half its revenue by the year’s end.

Discount math: As corporate execs cut back on their “tokenmaxxing” bonanzas, AI labs are left scrambling. But steep discounts squeeze margins at companies already bleeding money on compute. Anthropic only just projected its first operating profit this quarter, while OpenAI expects to burn roughly 14 times more cash than Anthropic before turning a profit around 2030, per earlier WSJ reporting.

Premium vs. pre-installed: Price cutting also threatens to set off a deeper test of where customers are actually willing to shell out. ChatGPT has far more users than Claude, but most are on the free tier, while Anthropic’s betting on its top-shelf models to make up for fewer total users. (Its brand-new Fable 5 model costs double what Opus 4.8 does—and will have usage-based pricing starting June 23.)

Still, the AI race could hinge on integration and convenience rather than having the flashiest model: While OpenAI and Anthropic duke it out, Apple and Google are baking AI into devices and programs billions of consumers already use. (And Google just slashed one of its AI subscriptions, too.)

Bottom line: AI companies are walking a tightrope between deep price cuts to draw people in and compute costs that keep climbing as AI use gets more token-hungry. How they keep their balance will be the first real proof of which lab—if any—has an edge that customers won’t abandon even for a discount. —WK

Loud and clear (and never too loud)

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Last night's Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals game was the moment I knew the soundbar I've been testing had changed how I watch TV. It took a few ad breaks to notice, though. For once, the ads played at the same volume as the game (you know, instead of five times louder for no reason). The new Bose Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar uses AI to level ad audio, a feature Bose doesn't really market. (Its president of premium consumer audio, Raza Haider, mentioned it to me in an interview before testing, and it was the detail I immediately hooked onto—I’m clearly scarred.)

How we tested it: I've used the soundbar daily since May 11 in my living room, replacing my TV's built-in speakers. Setup was quick: I plugged it into my TV's eARC port and ran CustomTune to optimize it for the room, then tested it across streaming platforms, movies, and live TV (the natural habitat of obnoxiously loud ads).

I'm also a chronic subtitle user because modern audio mixing loves burying dialogue (an annoying fix, since I tend to read faster than actors speak). Haider told me an "absurd" number of people watch movies with captions: "We've all gotten used to it, because it's become normal, but that's not normal. You should never accept that." After a month with the dialogue-boosting SpeechClarity feature, I believe him. The Medium setting helped with most of what I watched, but High let me turn subtitles off for nearly everything.

The Dolby Atmos immersion is also pretty great. Watching Top Gun: Maverick for the first time, I heard fighter jets streak left to right across my living room, which was thrilling for about 15–20 minutes until it settled into just feeling normal. (Maybe that's the point.)

The Good: I can finally hear dialogue without squinting to read along, and ads no longer ambush me with jumpscares. Setup took less than 15 minutes. I went in a skeptic and came out a convert.

The Bad: The $1,099 price tag stings, even though it’s pretty standard at this level. (Sonos's premium offering, the Arc Ultra, costs the same.)

Verdict: Signal (if your ears flinch at every commercial break, or you're tired of reading your TV). —SM

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Forget 360 reviews—one software engineer lets his heart rate do the talking. He says he reverse-engineered his Whoop band to pull per-minute heart rate data, then matches the spikes against his work calendar and ranks coworkers by the stress they cause him. "I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily," he wrote in a post on X. (His previous hits include an “I GOT FIRED” button that pushes your now-former company’s codebase public and bedroom lights wired to his stock portfolio.)

The results of the recent Whoop experiment: A growth PM was flagged as the "prime suspect;" a senior dev actually calmed him down, and his manager scored perfectly neutral (which is either reassuring or deeply suspicious). One skeptic in the comments noted that sugar, stairs, and boring work could all skew the data, but our guy is unbothered—averaged over a month, he says "it gives a decent picture tbh."

Other commenters have big plans. One suggested selling it to enterprises as "team performance analytics" so they know whom to lay off, and another wants to hook it up to his kids' screen time (something something masochist). Somewhere, an HR department's collective heart rate just spiked. —SM

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5