Three prominent artificial intelligence developers released new models over the last week. They all promise to be more advanced, but their biggest immediate selling point may be not what they can do but how little they charge to do it.<\/p>\n
OpenAI said its most advanced offering, GPT-5.6, is designed to complete more work while using significantly fewer tokens, a unit of data processed by AI models. This will make the software far more cost efficient for customers. <\/p>\n
Grok 4.5, from Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceXAI, is billed as having twice the token efficiency of comparable models from other firms. And Meta Platforms Inc. is making the pricing for its Muse Spark 1.1 very \u201cattractive,\u201d Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.<\/p>\n
The renewed emphasis on cost coincides with business customers scrutinizing AI spending. Earlier this year, firms encouraged employees to outdo one another by using AI as much as possible, a practice known as tokenmaxxing. But in recent months, some companies have imposed tighter limits after being hit by sticker shock, in part due to developers like Anthropic PBC switching to usage-based pricing rather than simply charging a flat subscription fee. <\/p>\n
Gautier Cloix, CEO of Paris-based AI startup H Company, said he\u2019s spoken with a number of executives whose businesses have racked up significant bills after using models from OpenAI and Anthropic. One CEO showed him an invoice indicating a month of AI model usage cost millions of dollars, Cloix said.<\/p>\n
\u201cCompanies are spending a lot more than they used to,\u201d said Gil Luria, head of technology research at DA Davidson & Co. \u201cAs they see these costs get out of control, they\u2019re starting to ask questions about efficiency.\u201d <\/p>\n
As a result, top AI developers must now find ways to maximize value for current and potential customers, without undercutting themselves to the point where they\u2019d struggle to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they\u2019ve invested in chips and data centers.<\/p>\n
Meta, which benefits from having a lucrative online advertising business, is prepared to be \u201caggressive,\u201d according to Zuckerberg. \u201cThe pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cWe think that there\u2019s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI may have less wiggle room but also sees the need to be competitive on costs. \u201cEvery enterprise now is thinking about spend and the value they\u2019re getting in exchange for AI, and this is what we really want to do,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The rhetoric is notably different from a year or so ago, when OpenAI executives were publicly musing about one day charging thousands of dollars for monthly subscriptions to top-tier AI models to better reflect the growing value they provide to businesses. <\/p>\n
Now, in addition to introducing more efficient new models, OpenAI has also been taking steps to help companies manage their AI outlays. Last month, the ChatGPT maker introduced credit usage analytics and updated spending controls. <\/p>\n
As businesses get more cost-conscious, they\u2019re \u201clooking for other solutions,\u201d Luria said. And there\u2019s no shortage of alternatives. Chinese tech companies like DeepSeek have flooded the market with more affordable open AI models. While these services still lag behind the most cutting-edge options from U.S. firms, the software is good enough to field many day-to-day duties.<\/p>\n
Some users are turning to model routing services, which allow them to seamlessly select from hundreds of AI models for various tasks to ensure better prices. One such service, OpenRouter, raised more than $100 million in funding in May to meet demand. <\/p>\n
By emphasizing cost efficiency, AI developers may also be able to put more pressure on Anthropic, viewed by many as the front-runner of the moment. Anthropic\u2019s Opus and Fable models rank among the most expensive on a cost-per-task basis, according to data from Artificial Analysis, a benchmarking service. <\/p>\n
Musk specifically took aim at Anthropic in a post touting Grok 4.5 this week. \u201cIt is an Opus-class model,\u201d he wrote on social media, \u201cbut faster, more token-efficient and lower cost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smillie and Metz write for Bloomberg. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three prominent artificial intelligence developers released new models over the last week. They all promise to be more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2042,1479,6232,532,54129,54128,497,10362,54130,7491,1122,157,5061,797,35817],"class_list":["post-104357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-ai-model","tag-anthropic-pbc","tag-business-customer","tag-company","tag-comparable-model","tag-cost-coincide","tag-datum","tag-dollar","tag-gautier-cloix","tag-gpt-5","tag-meta","tag-openai","tag-pricing","tag-service","tag-value"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}