OpenAI’s Greg Brockman: Build the Best AI, Then Make It Cheaper

Like even for example, yesterday my Dot flagged me a phishing email. It was actually a very well done phishing email. I never would have realized what it was. And my Dot just had been sort of reading through my email and was like, this looks so sketch because of this mismatch in the domain. And I was like, that's right. And that's what you want. You want an AI that's there looking out for you, even in ways you never would have anticipated.

So I think this, first of all, is something that all of the players in the industry are kind of encountering now. My philosophy is that first we should focus on the peak experience, right? Even if it's so expensive, just like the most transformative, you have the highest compute model that's always working for you with all of the different modalities turned on, all of those things. If it's expensive and inaccessible to most people, it's still worth building. But you don't stop there. Then the next step is you say, okay, we'll make a more affordable version that's more accessible that you can scale out to others. But even that first one, by the way, I think there's incredible PMF. I think there's incredible demand that we're seeing for this like AI always on, always working for you. And it just does all these surprising things.

Well, look, I would look at, I mean, to me, just at a qualitative sense. If you look at what's really going on in these models, is that we have been able to make these incredible efficiency gains very repeatedly year after year. For example, we dropped the price of Luna 80%, like an 80% price cut this year. And I think that our historical average has been that for a fixed level of intelligence, we probably do a 10x or even sometimes almost 100x price cut year over year on it. And I think that you can look at that from two ways. One is that you can just keep some of that margin, and the other is you can just say that these models, you can get such incredible efficiencies. And so my view of where we're headed is a world where the frontier models, and you can just see this even for looking at open router stats and these other publicly available ones, is all of the dollars basically go to the frontier models. And then you have these lower margin but extremely high token count models in the form of things like Luna. And I think that the margins, basically people are almost price insensitive, sometimes to an irrational degree on the frontier models. People just like, give me the best thing. And I think it also shows you how much value these are delivering for customers, certainly in many industries, that if you give them the smartest possible model that they can make incredible revenues out of that. And so you almost can tune your margins almost arbitrarily there. And so to me, I think that the opportunity and the engine and the pace of progress, all of that is coming together in a way that I think that you'll just continue to see these numbers skyrocket.

Well, look, I think that the way, like if you just look at the ethos of what we do, like we believe this is technology that can lift up everyone. We want to try to put this into everyone's hands and we want to empower, transform every enterprise. And you can see that in our technology, you can see that in the products, and you can see it in our pricing. And what we found is that, for example, when we did that 80% price cut on Luna, I think that the volume grew like more than 10 times or something crazy now. And so you actually do the math, it actually ends up being pretty favorable. And so I think that we are in a world where competition is resulting in the customer really winning, which is really fantastic in my books.