· ai-devtools
Sam Altman almost scrapped token pricing. Here’s why he backed off.
OpenAI considered dropping token-based pricing for its next model, letting developers submit a prompt and receive a price for the work, before negative customer feedback convinced the company to back away from the idea, CEO Sam Altman says.
The flat-fee pricing idea Speaking Thursday with Stripe President John Collison on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman recalls that OpenAI "almost made a very — what would've been a bad call" to stop pricing its next model in tokens altogether, moving instead to an arrangement where a developer hands over a prompt and OpenAI hands back a price. The billing would have worked "like AWS," he explained, where you "just do something and we send you a bill" rather than metering the exchange token by token.
Altman does not name the model in question or give a timeline for when the change was under consideration. We've cued up the exchange in the video below: Why customers pushed back The idea ran into resistance when OpenAI tried to gauge how customers felt about receiving a price with no breakdown.
