There have been a lot of anxious murmurings lately about the price of AI going way up. Developers are spending more money training and running AI systems as competition thickens and the electrical grid gets squeezed. Customers, meanwhile, are shelling out more in order to get access to the latest models.
Earlier this week, Anthropic—moving towards what’s expected to be a historic IPO—released Fable 5, a dialed-down version of the secretive and supposedly extremely powerful Mythos. Fable 5 costs twice as much as its predecessor, Opus 4.8, even though some users have complained that the former’s touchy safety guardrails render it effectively unusable in some contexts. Presumably with its ear to those anxieties, OpenAI is now weighing significant reductions to the price they charge for tokens (the basic unit for measuring AI usage), the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. To anyone who isn’t deeply immersed in the finer intricacies of AI finance, this can all be a bit baffling. It would be extremely convenient if there were some simple method for converting one million “input tokens” to a particular task, for example, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. Each task brings its own computational demands, which for pay-as-you-go models means users will have to pay different amounts depending on how they use AI. Subscription tiers offer a bit more simplicity, but these plans come with their own terms and prices, which vary between companies and models.
