“I am optimistic that we are going to drive prices down more than anyone thinks is possible or reasonable or likely. And I think that will help the global stuff we are doing,” Altman said during a select media roundtable on the sidelines of the ongoing India AI Impact Summit here.
The cost of getting an answer from one of OpenAI's models has fallen by more than 1,000 times over the last 14 months. Though the per-response price of frontier AI models may not fall as fast going ahead, these prices are certainly going to come down, Altman said.
The per-line cost of software code written by AI has also come down over the years, and is now cheaper than that written by humans, he said, adding that AI models are already much more efficient per token and inference time compared to the same parameters for every human-thought token generated.
“The energy cost analogies always get weird. People usually talk about the energy cost of a person at inference time when they solve something, versus AI’s total training time. A person also takes a lot of energy over the course of their lifetime to train and run their body for a long time,” Altman said.
A lot of resources — whether it is funds, energy, or water — is now needed for inference of AI models rather than training. Countries will also need to decide whether they want to run AI inference and training locally on their own data or outsource the task to another company or country, he said in response to a question from Business Standard.
Even for countries from the Global South, including India, the balance will have to be decided by the leadership, he said.
“I have been surprised by how different leaders feel about whether they want to set up AI infrastructure. It will be up to each country to decide that individually,” Altman said.
India’s conviction to invest in infrastructure, model, and application layer of the AI architecture was “really quite amazing”, he said, adding that the rapid adoption of AI tools in India was incredible.
“I do not know what that is going to mean for the country, but I also do not know of any country that is adopting AI with more vigour and faster,” Altman said.
A lot of jobs in the software and information technology (IT) services industry are going to change shape in the near future as the cost of coding comes down sharply, and it becomes increasingly easier to make software, he said.
“A lot of software companies have a value proposition that is quite different. I think this is going to be the greatest boom the world has ever seen in entrepreneurship, at least for software companies,” the OpenAI CEO said.
 "Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI")