recent,OpenAIExecutives are mulling an eye-popping subscription program - the upcoming newLarge Model“strawberry"and"Orion"The price is a whopping $2,000 per month, a full 100 times more than the current $20 for ChatGPT Plus! This kind of sky-high pricing is certainly a shocker.
There are two main reasons why OpenAI dares to set such a price: one is the shortage of funds, and a large amount of funds is needed to support the huge computing power demand; the other is that the new product is extremely powerful, and coupled with the existing user base of hundreds of millions, OpenAI is confident in setting such a price.
Data shows that OpenAI has invested about $7 billion in hardware facilities and training large models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and $1.5 billion in employee salaries, plus other copyright fees, which has reached $10 billion. The daily operating cost is at least $700,000, and the CEO's annual income is as high as $3.4 billion. OpenAI is clearly in a dilemma of continued losses.
However, the strength of the new products "Strawberry" and "Orion" is also the basis for creating a high price. It is reported that they are in the late stages of development, with more powerful reasoning ability to solve complex logic and mathematical problems, but also has a hot AI Agent function, in a number of areas to achieve a qualitative leap.
At the same time, OpenAI's ChatGPT series of products has also performed impressively. The number of corporate paying users has exceeded 1 million, of which 80% is one of the world's top 500 companies; ChatGPT Plus has more than 3 million paying users, 200 million monthly active users, and more than 1.6 billion monthly visits. These huge user bases undoubtedly give OpenAI pricing power.
For "Strawberry" and "Orion" sky-high subscription fees, if it can save users a lot of time and create enough business value, I think there are still many companies are willing to pay. After all, OpenAI has established a dominant position in the field of large models by virtue of its technical strength and user base.