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.

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.

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

That's pricing.

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

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.