Unexpected Findings

- openai has promotional offers for new subscribers and college students, so it's like free plus for a month or more, and some people 'secretly arbitrage'. they use automated tools to sign up for free/edu accounts, hundreds if not thousands of them, this is called 'account pooling'. they then use something like 'sub2api' or similar tools to 'reverse proxy' subscription tokens to serve their own customers at extremely low prices (10-30% of openai pricing). this is absolutely unfair, unethical, and unlawful. these accounts with abnormal behaviors will result in permanent ban within 1-3days of account activation, sometimes 24 hours or less(depending on openai's anti-abuse strategy). and of course, these people maybe use some other unlawful methods to get new&free subscriptions, they call it 'grey industry'. some methods are just crime so i won't elaborate here. websites providing these services are called 'transit point' or 'transit station'(translation difference). i even found a joke about it: every time tibo announce 1m subs increase, half million are created by account pooling bros. (can't remember the exact words but similar)

- as for the pro subscriptions, things are little different(no free subs obviously). there is another class of 'transit point' websites, they mainly work with other ai companies(take a guess). pro class transit stations are like agencies for competitor ai companies to distill openai and anthropic models. i believe it's well-known, not a secret anymore. the scale of accounts and distillations are just mind-blowing. it's like parasites leeching SOTA models. openai and anthropic developed many methods to fight distillations, one important change is to hide some of their model's CoT.

- it's an ongoing and endless confrontation i guess. everything i say in this post is actually 'public', you can DYOR by using grok(it can natively search twitter contents), ask about these things and ask grok to find related posts/contents, it will find a lot stuff in different languages. if you don't want to use grok, try the integrated web browser in codex or claude, maybe try some keywords. i never tried search twitter in codex or claude browsers, i guess it's less efficient and harder to research.

one funny thing: most 'transit stations' don't offer 5.6 luna, since it's dirty cheap and they can't make profit by providing it at 10-30% of official price. crazy business-maxing bros.