"It costs OpenAI less money to serve GPT-5.5 than GPT-4." does it though? do you have the numbers? Or you just making stuff up?

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ralusek 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

We used to not know, but now because open source models are being hosted and served by people whose only incentive is making profit on directly running inference, we have a ballpark idea.

	▲	alex_sf 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There's no reason to think that the latest frontier models have similar inference costs to open source models. It would be more surprising if the surrounding architecture hasn't significantly diverged. If it _hasn't_ significantly diverged, then given the performance difference it would imply that the frontier models have significantly greater param counts, which would result in a higher cost.

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simianwords an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

GPT-4 (original API):

Input: $30 / 1M tokens

Output: $60 / 1M tokens

GPT-5.5:

Input: $5 / 1M tokens

Output: $30 / 1M tokens

Costs have been reducing by over 5x year over year. Inference cost concern is mostly performative.

https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/conclusive-proofs-that-llm-...

Edit: can't reply but companies aren't selling inference at loss. In the blog post I point to third party hosting of open models like Deepseek which are also going down. They are not VC backed.

I also point to Gemma 31B which you can run on your laptop today that beats most models from 2024.

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zamalek an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What they charge people says nothing about what it costs them. Off the top of my head, one confounding factor is trying to win back marketshare from Anthropic.

We will only know the actually situation once Anthropic goes public and we can look at their books.

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rafaelero 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think it's pretty safe to assume they are not losing money on inference.

	▲	basilgohar 34 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Based on what? They haven't even IPOed.
	▲	multjoy 31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think it’s safe to assume that they are bleeding cash.
	▲	alex_sf 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's silicon valley and they are trying to aggressively grow. Your baseline assumption should be the exact opposite.
	▲	31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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IncRnd 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you go to https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing, you will see the actual prices, which do not match what you posted:

GPT-4.1 Input: $2.00 / 1M Tokens Output: $8.00 / 1M Tokens

	▲	raincole 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The parent comment is correct. They are talking about GPT-4, which was really expensive by today's standard. After GPT4o came out, GPT-4 was completely forgotten.

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Ygg2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's pricing.

Pricing has no correlation with profit. It can be artificially lowered to kill competition, and artificially inflated to maximize profit.

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alex_sf an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The price a company charges, _particularly_ a high growth VC-backed one, is a poor signal for their costs.

That blog post is not very compelling either. Without knowing details of the architecture, comparing the various frontier models to open models doesn’t make sense.