OpenAI is ready to open up

gm legends. It’s Sunday.

This week: how to mute yourself in meetings, the right way to charge for AI products, where OpenAI’s money comes from, and why television keeps you guessing. Plus, five of our favorite launches from the past week. 

Cool products below. Stop skimming and start reading.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

AI tools might be new, but Jake Friedberg does things the old-fashioned way: SaaS pricing with monthly tiers. But since “every prompt costs money,” he’s now seeing some AI platforms charge based on use. What’s the way forward?

There are some partisans for SaaS and usage, but several people are saying that a hybrid model is the way to go, and a lot are getting into the nitty gritty of which model is best for conversions.

Perhaps no one on the planet looks at more apps and tools every day than our Head of Product Curation, Gabe Perez. This week, he praised two new tools, including one from Product Hunt CEO Rajiv Ayyanger:

• CapslockMute is a quick keyboard shortcut to make sure you’re silent on Zoom, Teams, and Tandem.

Gabe says: “I actually built something similar a while back but never launched it (I was trying to get too fancy with it). I love your approach of making it software specific vs trying to tackle it all at once.”

• Runo 2.0 is an app that helps you run at a steady cadence.

Gabe says: “This is really clever! I actually try to have a beat in my head that I run to but never thought of a ‘pulse’ or ‘metronome’ to do this. Personally LOVE the Apple Watch Haptics feedback, I don't run with headphones so this is perfect. The design is really nice as well.”

The open secret about OpenAI is that it’s hemorrhaging money. Not like an overly cocky poker player in Vegas. More like Elon Musk accidentally purchasing companies. 

AI is a long-term bet, as the infrastructure to handle billions of prompts per day is still being built. The company doesn’t think it will start turning a profit til 2029. In the meantime, it’s projecting it will lose $14B this year. 

In short, it needs money. And this week, it got some good and bad news on that front.

The good news: Amazon is reportedly interested in pouring up to $50B into the company, half of OpenAI’s total target. (SoftBank, which already has a stake in the company, is considering pitching in another $30B.)

The bad news: Nvidia is reportedly rethinking a memorandum of understanding to invest $100B in OpenAI. The plan was for the behemoth chipmaker to help the ChatGPT creator build up its computing power—and subsidize the costs.

And that’s not all! The Wall Street Journal also reports that OpenAI is looking to go public by the end of the year, which brings more investors into the mix.

The company can use the money to push its products, and it’s been very active on that front. Between December 12 and January 28, it registered five launches on Product Hunt:

• GPT-5.2, its most recent frontier model for ChatGPT, which came after a push to retake the lead from Google and Anthropic
• ChatGPT Images, which turns prompts into pictures
• FrontierScience, a benchmark to tell how well it does scientific reasoning
• ChatGPT Health, which doesn’t give medical advice…but kinda sorta gives medical advice
• Prism, a collaborative workspace for scientists that launched this week.

Obviously, OpenAI has competitors, some of whom had their own launches this week: 

• Just this week, Google launched Agentic Vision in Gemini. 
• Also this week, xAI’s Grok released its Imagine API.
• Anthropic is still riding high off January’s rollout of Cowork.
• Deepseek, an open-source LLM, put out v3.2 in December.

Which means: There’s more money to be raised…and spent.

Stop what you’re doing. It’s time to check your geography chops with this short, Wordle-inspired game. Bharat says he made it because he and his wife were always trying to guess the country on the TV’s screensaver. Who says television is a waste of time?