OpenAI’s o3 costs way, way more than you think
OpenAI’s o3 “reasoning” AI model, showcased in December with the ARC-AGI creators, now has revised and less impressive results, with updated computing costs suggesting it’s far pricier than initially thought.
The Arc Prize Foundation, which maintains ARC-AGI, initially estimated the best-performing o3 configuration, o3 high, cost about $3,000 to solve a single ARC-AGI problem. The updated estimates now suggest a cost closer to $30,000 per task.
This revision highlights the potentially high costs of sophisticated AI models for certain tasks. OpenAI hasn’t priced or released o3 yet, but the Arc Prize Foundation considers o1-pro a reasonable pricing proxy.
Mike Knoop, co-founder of the Arc Prize Foundation, stated to TechCrunch that o1-pro is a closer comparison of true o3 cost, given the test-time compute used. He also mentioned that because of uncertainty until official pricing is announced, o3 is still labeled as preview on their leaderboard.
The high price aligns with o3 high’s reported computing resource usage, as it used 172x more computing than o3 low to address ARC-AGI, according to the Arc Prize Foundation.
Rumors also suggest that OpenAI may introduce pricey plans for enterprise customers, with The Information reporting potential charges of up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents”.
While some argue that even OpenAI’s most expensive models will cost less than a human contractor, AI researcher Toby Ord noted on X that the models may not be as efficient. For instance, o3 high needed 1,024 attempts per ARC-AGI task to achieve its best score.