OpenAI's announcement of a $100-per-month ChatGPT Pro tier represents a critical inflection point for the generative AI industry: the company is explicitly segmenting users by willingness to pay for computational intensity. The new tier offers substantially higher usage limits for Codex, OpenAI's code generation tool, and targets professionals engaged in "longer, high-effort" sessions. This pricing move follows the existing $20-per-month Plus subscription and underscores OpenAI's tiered monetization strategy. The structure reveals a fundamental tension in large language model economics—running inference at scale is expensive, and free or modestly priced offerings cannot sustain the infrastructure costs of millions of concurrent users. OpenAI has reportedly been burning through billions annually despite generating significant revenue, suggesting that even paid tiers may struggle to achieve profitability without dramatic improvements in model efficiency or dramatic price increases.