Altman says token-based pricing will become obsolete: GPT-5.5 is more expensive per unit but usage has decreased dramatically, and customers only care about task completion.

According to AIMPACT, on April 29th (UTC+8), as monitored by Beating, tech commentator Ben Thompson published a joint interview on Stratechery with OpenAI CEO Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman, focusing on their recently announced Bedrock Managed Agents. In the interview, Altman discussed pricing, arguing that token-based pricing is unsustainable in the long run. He cited GPT-5.5 as an example: the price per token is much higher than GPT-5.4, but far fewer tokens are used to perform the same task. Users don't care about the number of tokens; they only care about the total price after the task is completed. "We're not a token factory, more like an intelligence factory. Customers want to buy the most intelligence for the least amount of money. They don't care whether the underlying model runs a large number of tokens or a small model runs a large number of tokens," Altman said. He added that OpenAI's current customers are more interested in acquiring capacity than negotiating prices: "Right now, far more customers are saying 'Give me more capacity, no matter the price,' than those who are haggling over prices." He compared AI to water and electricity: even if water is cheap, you won't drink much more, but intelligence is different. "As long as the price is low enough, I'll keep using more; no other utility is like that." Garman chimed in, saying that the unit price of computing power has dropped by orders of magnitude over the past 30 years, but more computing power is being sold today than ever before. Altman also positioned ChatGPT as "the first truly large-scale consumer-grade new product since Facebook." He admitted that he initially thought AI would revolutionize search, but the real success lay in ChatGPT itself and the Codex API. "Google is still underestimated in many ways." (Source: ME)