OpenAI's Altman: The Cost of Using AI Will Decrease by 10 Times Every Year

According to a blog post by Altman on Sunday, the cost of utilizing artificial intelligence at the current level is dropping at an astonishing rate, decreasing to one-tenth of its original price approximately every 12 months. This dramatic reduction in price has significantly boosted its usage. He further illustrated that from the token cost of GPT-4 in early 2023 to the token cost of GPT-4o by mid-2024, the price per token had astonishingly dropped by about 150 times. Altman remarked that the pace of this change even surpasses Moore's Law, which predicts performance doubling every 18 months, and its impact is incredibly powerful.

This is one of the three key points Altman raised in his post about the trends in AI development. In addition to the significant drop in costs, he emphasized that the intelligence of AI models is directly proportional to the amount of resources used during their development. Altman wrote: "It seems that as long as sufficient funds are invested, continuous and predictable performance improvements can be achieved; this scaling rule has been verified across multiple scales."

Furthermore, Altman pointed out that due to the "super-exponential" growth of AI model intelligence, "there is no reason to believe that we will stop this exponential growth investment in the near future." He believed that if these three observations continue to hold true, the implications for society will be profound. He predicted that the prices of many goods would eventually plummet (currently, intelligence costs and energy costs are the main factors limiting the development of many things), while luxury goods and inherently scarce resources, such as land, may see even higher price increases.

In response to Altman's views, OpenAI representatives did not reply to a request for comment from Business Insider. Notably, just weeks before Altman's post, AI-related stocks experienced a major sell-off in January, mainly due to concerns about reduced demand for Nvidia chips and other AI hardware caused by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, launching high-performance and low-cost models.

At the same time, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are increasing their investments in the AI field. Executives from these companies stated in recent earnings reports that they are stepping up their AI investments. According to statistics, the combined capital expenditures of these four companies this year will exceed $320 billion.

Last month, Altman attended the launch event of the "Stargate" plan announced by President Trump at the White House. This is a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment project initiated by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and UAE investor MGX. During an interview with Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier," Altman mentioned the "Stargate" plan: "This means we can build AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) right here in the United States."