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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits AI token costs are becoming 'a huge issue' — company seeks improved value as overspending becomes a meme

Barnsley

Well-known member
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said in an interview that companies are now concerned about the growing costs of AI use. Speaking during the Intelligence at Work event, he said this is the first time that OpenAI’s clients raised the issue and that the startup is now looking for ways to make its models more efficient.

"People are really saying, you know, it’s kind of a meme now, but ‘My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1. Can you make this more efficient?’” Altman said on stage. “We are continuing to push on that more with models. I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend. But that went from, at the beginning of this year, an issue that never came up (people were totally happy with the amount they were spending) to, all of a sudden, a huge issue.”


There have recently been a lot of stories of companies getting massive AI bills as they experiment with “tokenmaxxing.” A few company leaders believed that AI use would increase the productivity of their workers, thus increasing revenue. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously said that his engineers should use AI tokens that are worth at least half their annual salary, or else he'd be “deeply alarmed.” We also saw another example with OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, whose team spent $1.3 million on OpenAI API tokens in a month, totaling 603 billion tokens.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...improved-value-as-overspending-becomes-a-meme
 
the way i see it, you don't need top of line LLMs to do most of work. Chinese AI labs model are good enough while their cost is cheaper than US's top AI lab like OpenAI. Chinese might win like Wintel (Intel/Windows) back in the day where its good enough that people will buy in. Cursor already doing it by taking Moonshot AI's model then tweak it and offer it cheaper.
 
the way i see it, you don't need top of line LLMs to do most of work. Chinese AI labs model are good enough while their cost is cheaper than US's top AI lab like OpenAI. Chinese might win like Wintel (Intel/Windows) back in the day where its good enough that people will buy in. Cursor already doing it by taking Moonshot AI's model then tweak it and offer it cheaper.

Will it be possible to bulk buy tokens for X and then sell for Y with slim margins?

Like the mobile phone operators who dont have infrastructure just sell data plans.
 
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