OpenAI Chairman Said AI Model Costs Fell 100-Fold in 18 Months

BARCELONA, March 5, 2026 — The cost of running a state-of-the-art AI model dropped 100-fold in 18 months while quality improved 50 percent, OpenAI Board Chairman Bret Taylor said Wednesday at Mobile World Congress here. That compression, he said, would drive the price of a single customer service call toward one cent.

Taylor is also CEO of Sierra, a Silicon Valley startup that deploys AI agents for enterprise customer service. The former co-CEO of software-as-a-service giant Salesforce, Taylor is chairmann of the AI giant of which Sam Altman is the CEO.

GPT-4, OpenAI's large language model, cost $60 per million output tokens three years ago, Taylor said. Its successor, GPT-4o, now costs 60 cents per million output tokens and scored 50 percent higher on human evaluation benchmarks, he said.