OpenAI reportedly burning $220k-$2.5M per researcher per year on frontier tokens
zephyr_z9 · x · 2026-09-07
- Quoting theojaffee: OpenAI is spending $220k-$2.5M+ per researcher per year on frontier tokens, and the spend has inflected upward in recent months — used to argue businesses won't just settle for cheaper Chinese open-source models.
- zephyrz9 counters that API pricing is the wrong metric given 90%-95% inference margins; actual spend per the reported OPEX is closer to $22k-$250k+ per year per researcher.
- The two figures differ by roughly an order of magnitude, but both point to rapidly ballooning frontier model consumption inside top labs.
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