OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will be costly to build but more affordable to use over time

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman provided extensive insights into the future of artificial intelligence and its underlying economics in a detailed blog post released on Sunday, February 9. In his post, Altman explained that continuous and predictable gains in AI performance can be achieved by investing “arbitrary amounts of money.” He emphasised that the intelligence of an AI model is approximately proportional to the logarithm of the resources—primarily training compute, data, and inference compute—used in its development.

Altman also highlighted that user costs for accessing AI systems are expected to fall by a factor of 10 every 12 months, noting a dramatic drop in token costs from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024. These observations were shared on the eve of the two-day Paris AI Action Summit, which began on February 10, where Altman is scheduled to speak on the sidelines.