Altman Says Token Pricing Will Become Obsolete: GPT-5.5 Unit Price Higher but Usage Plummets, Clients Only Care About Task Completion

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, tech commentator Ben Thompson published a joint interview on Stratechery with OpenAI CEO Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman, discussing their recently announced Bedrock Managed Agents. Altman discussed pricing during the interview, believing that pricing based on tokens is not a sustainable long-term approach. Using GPT-5.5 as an example, he mentioned that while the price per token is much higher than GPT-5.4, the number of tokens required for the same task is much lower. Users are not concerned about the number of tokens; they only care about the completion of the task and the total price. He positioned OpenAI as an "intelligence factory" rather than a token factory, stating that customers want to spend the least amount of money to acquire the most intelligence, regardless of the underlying model or token usage.

Altman also mentioned that currently, OpenAI has far more customers requesting increased capacity than negotiating prices. He analogized AI to hydropower: while you wouldn't consume significantly more water even if it were cheaper, intelligence is different. He said, "As long as the price is low enough, I'll keep using more. No other public utility works like this." Garman added that over the past 30 years, the unit price of computation has decreased by orders of magnitude, yet the amount of computation sold today is higher than ever before.

Thompson brought up Altman's 2023 confidence that AI would threaten Google Search and asked for his retrospective view. Altman mentioned that the outcome was better than expected but in unexpected ways. They thought AI would change how people find information online and directly challenge search. However, OpenAI's success mainly came from ChatGPT as a standalone consumer product and the Codex API, rather than search itself being disrupted. He referred to ChatGPT as the "first truly large-scale consumer-grade new product since Facebook" and acknowledged that Google is still underestimated in many aspects.