> we'd probably happily pay >$500 a month for the current frontier models
Try $5,000. OpenAI loses hundreds of billions a year, they need a 100x, not 2x.
Why lie on a site where people know things.
OpenAI loses hundreds of billions a year on inference? I strongly doubt it
$60k/yr still seems like a good deal for the productivity multiplier you get on an experienced engineer costing several times that. Actually, I'm fairly certain that some optimizations I had codex do this week would already pay for that from being able to scale down pod resource requirements, and that's just from me telling it to profile our code and find high ROI things to fix, taking only part of my focus away from planned work.
Another data point: I gave codex a 2 sentence description (being intentionally vague and actually slightly misleading) of a problem that another engineer spent ~1 week root causing a couple months ago, and it found the bug in 3.5 minutes.
These things were hot garbage right up until the second they weren't. Suddenly, they are immensely useful. That said, I doubt my usage costs anywhere near that much to openai.
But they are not losing 100x on inference on high paying customers. Their biggest loss is free user + training/development cost