OpenAI Engineer: Token-Based Pricing Is Broken, Cost Should Be Measured Per Task
OpenAI engineer Steven Heidel argued token pricing is misleading because GPT-6 Astra's efficiency makes it cheaper per task than models 13x cheaper per token, and amplified findings that Anthropic quietly raised Opus 4.7 costs 30% via a less efficient tokenizer.
2026-09-04 ~ 2026-09-04 · 4 related posts
- Episode 1: OpenAI launches flagship GPT-6 Astra to rave reviews and pricing debates(2026-09-04, 190 posts)
- Episode 2: GPT-6 Astra saturates ARC-AGI-3 with near-perfect scores and near-zero reasoning tokens(2026-09-04, 10 posts)
- Episode 3: OpenAI Engineer: Token-Based Pricing Is Broken, Cost Should Be Measured Per Task(2026-09-04, 4 posts)
- Episode 4: OpenAI reportedly quietly edited GPT-6 Astra benchmark results(2026-09-05, 4 posts)
- Episode 5: Users Report GPT-6 Astra Hits New SOTA in Agentic CAD(2026-09-05, 2 posts)
- Episode 6: GPT-6 Astra reportedly runs Blender for 5 hours on 3D modeling(2026-09-06, 2 posts)
- Episode 7: Astra's Record Debut Reportedly Pushes OpenAI to Accelerate Roadmap(2026-09-06, 2 posts)
- Astra is 2.5x pricier per token yet cheaper and faster per task than sol and fable — 12exyz · 2026-09-04
- Token pricing is meaningless now: Astra cheaper per task than Gemini 3.8 Flash — stevenheidel · 2026-09-04
- OpenAI Engineer: Anthropic's Tokenizer Change Snuck a ~30% Cost Hike into Opus 4.7 — stevenheidel · 2026-09-04
- OpenAI engineer: token pricing is meaningless now — measure cost per task, not per token — hudzah · 2026-09-04