OpenAI Appears To Still Face Financial Hurdles As Altman Says ChatGPT Pro Runs At A Loss

As a leading AI company, OpenAI's commercial endeavors are closely watched by the entire industry, but the latest news indicates that monetizing large models remains a challenge.

On Monday, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted on X that the company's ChatGPT Pro subscription service is currently operating at a loss, as people are using it much more frequently than the company anticipated. In another reply, he noted that he personally set the subscription price, expecting that OpenAI would make money from this charge.

Currently, the ChatGPT Pro subscription costs $200 per month, allowing users access to a range of AI services, including the o1 inference model.

In early 2023, analysts estimated the cost of running large models. Analyst Dylan Patel predicted that operating ChatGPT would cost OpenAI about $700,000 per day, or roughly 36 cents per query.

However, this cost may have significantly increased, with the cost per query for OpenAI's most advanced models estimated to have reached $1,000. These costs include the electricity consumed by AI, as well as investments in building and maintaining data centers.

What's more alarming for the industry is that the more advanced and intelligent the model, the more expensive it is to run, making pricing an extremely difficult decision. OpenAI's board seemed to reluctantly admit in a blog post at the end of last year that the company needs far more financing than expected, despite having recently raised $6.6 billion.

The company has also considered raising the subscription price, but it is said that the rate of increase in subscription prices is far outpaced by the energy consumption required to run the models, and it cannot prevent more users from frequently using the model.

Altman also revealed that while many users use ChatGPT out of curiosity, some seem to view ChatGPT as a substitute for Google, a development that OpenAI did not anticipate.