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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company once considered abandoning per-token billing for its next-generation models in favor of a model where developers submit a prompt and directly receive a price, similar to AWS's billing model. Altman said the idea was dropped because customer feedback was extremely negative; customers said they need to know what they are paying for, and would even rather accept inflated token counts and pay higher fees in order to keep an itemized bill they can verify. Altman acknowledged that tokens are "a kind of fictitious unit" and not a good way to measure, but OpenAI still uses token-based pricing for now.
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Sam Altman once considered abandoning token-based pricing, but dropped the idea due to customer oppositionDevelopments
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- Source:The New Stack
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Oct 30
The New Stack
Sam Altman once considered abandoning token-based pricing, but dropped the idea due to customer opposition
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company had considered abandoning token-based billing for its next-generation models in favor of a model where developers submit a prompt and receive a single price directly, similar to AWS's billing model, but dropped the idea because customer feedback was extremely negative. Customers said they need to know what they are paying for, and would even rather accept inflated token counts and pay higher fees than give up itemized billing they can verify. Altman acknowledged that tokens are "a kind of fake unit" and not a good way to measure usage, but OpenAI still uses token-based pricing for now.