OpenAI CFO Touts User Growth Resulting From Lowering Prices

OpenAI’s price cut on its GPT-5.6 Luna model shortly after its release in July resulted in a tenfold increase in model usage, said OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar in an interview on Monday at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology conference in San Francisco. Usage of the model is now “higher than even the next Chinese model,” giving OpenAI the highest market share on OpenRouter, a platform that allows users to access AI models from several different companies in one place, Friar said.

Friar’s remarks focused largely on the company’s efforts to bring down the cost for users of its AI models, including by making the chip design process faster. She said that its AI models helped the company send the design for Jalapeño, a custom chip it designed in-house, to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for manufacturing much more quickly than it could have otherwise. Friar suggested that the company could sell its AI-powered chip design capabilities to other customers and price the offering based on the outcomes it delivers rather than charging customers based on their consumption or the number of individuals using the model.

“When it comes to cost per token, what [customers] really care about is the cost to get a task done…it means we need to build frontier models where you require less terms to get a correct answer, with less human input,” Friar said.

Friar said that OpenAI’s just-released Astra model requires 68% fewer output tokens to get results from OpenAI’s Astra model that are comparable to results from Anthropic’s Fable 5.1. OpenAI released Astra, a model designed to operate a user’s computer autonomously, including by navigating web browsers and generating documents, last week.

“We’re investing in areas like chip design, life sciences, financial services, and may even have a banking announcement coming a little bit later this week in New York,” Friar added.