OpenAI's new pricing tiers highlight compute bottleneck
Semafor ·
Offering always-on, agentic assistant tools will cost OpenAI.
While OpenAI’s new tool, dots, stole much of the spotlight at its annual developer day Tuesday, it was the change to its pricing tiers that says more about the company and the AI industry. OpenAI’s $200-per-month plan now comes with half the tokens. And there’s now an eye-popping $500-per-month plan that makes the price of diesel these days seem like nothing.
The cost creep is another indication there is a severe compute bottleneck in AI. Offering always-on, agentic assistant tools will cost OpenAI and Meta — which recently launched its cutesy agent Muse — a ton of money, and it’s not clear yet that these agents will work well. AI products often overpromise because there just aren’t enough tokens to go around (and it would be too expensive) to make them capable at their maximum potential.
I haven’t yet worked with dots, but people are so far finding Meta’s Muse runs into paywalls and CAPTCHA hurdles they have to troubleshoot. Meanwhile, my Codex is humming away doing cool and useful things for me, and it’s not clear that my dot will be able to replace some of the projects I’ve already put time into building. Dots will likely wind up like a lot of new AI tools and features: completely amazing and, simultaneously, not quite there yet.
It costs OpenAI fortunes to do its more ambitious tasks, too. It recently spent about $10 million over roughly a weekend to solve part of the Navier-Stokes math equations. If AI was getting to the point where it’s so efficient it can take out humanity by Christmas, as so many fear, the price of tokens would be going down, not up, and it would cost a lot less to solve math problems.