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GPT 4.5 pricing is insane: Price Input: $75.00 / 1M tokens Cached input: $37.50 / 1M tokens Output: $150.00 / 1M tokens GPT 4o pricing for comparison: Price In
by zaptrem 2y ago
GPT 4.5 pricing is insane:
Price
Input:
$75.00 / 1M tokens
Cached input:
$37.50 / 1M tokens
Output:
$150.00 / 1M tokens
GPT 4o pricing for comparison:
Price
Input:
$2.50 / 1M tokens
Cached input:
$1.25 / 1M tokens
Output:
$10.00 / 1M tokens
It sounds like it's so expensive and the difference in usefulness is so lacking(?) they're not even gonna keep serving it in the API for long:
> GPT‑4.5 is a very large and compute-intensive model, making it more expensive than and not a replacement for GPT‑4o. Because of this, we’re evaluating whether to continue serving it in the API long-term as we balance supporting current capabilities with building future models. We look forward to learning more about its strengths, capabilities, and potential applications in real-world settings. If GPT‑4.5 delivers unique value for your use case, your feedback (opens in a new window) will play an important role in guiding our decision.
I'm still gonna give it a go, though.
- mmaunder 2y agoBut you get higher EQ. /s
- MattSayar 2y agoInput price difference: 4.5 is 30x more Output price difference:4.5 is 15x more In their model evaluation scores in the appendix, 4.5 is, on average, 26% better. I don't understand the value here.
- alwa 2y agoIf you ran the same query set 30x or 15x on the cheaper model (and compensated for all the extra tokens the reasoning model uses), would you be able to realize the same 26% quality gain in a machine-adjudicatible kind of way?
- j_maffe 2y agowith a reasoning model you'd get better than both.
- MattSayar 2y agoExactly. Not sure why you'd pick GPT 4.5 over lots of GPT 4o queries or an o1 query
- smohare 2y agoIgnoring latency for a second, one of the tricks for boosting quality is to utilize consensus. One probability does not need to call the lesser model 30x as much to achieve these gains sorta of gains. Moreover you have to take the purported gains with a grain of salt. The models are probably trained on the evaluation sets they are benchmarked against.
- mirekrusin 2y agoEinstein's IQ = 3.5x chimpanzees IQs, right?
- redox99 2y ago3.5x on a normal distribution with mean 100 and SD 15 is pretty insane. But I agree with your point, being 26% better at a certain benchmark could be a tiny difference, or an incredible improvement (imagine the hardest questions being Riemann hypothesis, P != NP, etc).
- minimaxir 2y agoSam Altman's explanation for the restriction is a bit fluffier: https://x.com/sama/status/1895203654103351462 https://x.com/sama/status/1895203654103351462 > bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. we will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then. (hundreds of thousands coming soon, and i'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.)
- rebolek 2y agoBad news: Sam Altman runs the show.
- rvnx 2y ago[flagged]
- g-mork 2y agorelease blog post author: this is definitely a research preview ceo: it's ready the pricing is probably a mixture of dealing with GPU scarcity and intentionally discouraging actual users. I can't imagine the pressure they must be under to show they are releasing and staying ahead, but Altman's tweet makes it clear they aren't really ready to sell this to the general public yet.
- pk-protect-ai 2y agoYeap, that the thing, they are not ahead anymore. Not since last summer at least. Yes they have probably largest customer base, but their models are not the best for a while already.
- danenania 2y agoEh, I think o1-pro is by far the most capable model available right now in terms of pure problem solving.
- sebastiennight 2y agoI think it's fairer to compare it to the original GPT-4 which might the equivalent in term of "size" (though we don't have actual numbers for either). GPT-4: Input $30.00 / 1M tokens ; Output $60.00 / 1M tokens So 4.5 is 2.5x more expensive. I think they announced this as their last non-reasoning model, so it was maybe with the goal of stretching pre-training as far as they could, just to see what new capabilities would show up. We'll find out as the community gives it a whirl. I'm a Tier 5 org and I have it available already in the API.
- jstummbillig 2y agoWhy would that be fairer? We can assume they did incorporate all learnings and optimizations they made post gpt-4 launch, no?
- sebastiennight 2y agoNot necessarily. If this huge model has taken months to pre-train and was expected to be released before, say, o3-mini, you could definitely have some last-minute optimizations in o3-mini that were not considered at the time of building the architecture of gpt-4.5.
- jychang 2y agoDefinitely not. They don't distill their original models. 4o is a much more distilled and cheaper version of 4. I assume 4.5o would be a distilled and cheaper version of 4.5. It'd be weird to release a distilled version without ever releasing the base undistilled version.
- minimaxir 2y agoThe marginal costs for running a GPT-4-class LLM are much lower nowadays due to significant software and hardware innovations since then, so costs/pricing are harder to compare.
- sebastiennight 2y agoAgreed, however it might make sense that a much-larger-than-GPT-4 LLM would also, at launch, be more expensive to run than the OG GPT-4 was at launch. (And I think this is probably also scarecrow pricing to discourage casual users from clogging the API since they seem to be too compute-constrained to deliver this at scale)
- harlanlewis 2y agoThe price really is eye watering. At a glance, my first impression is this is something like Llama 3.1 405B, where the primary value may be realized in generating high quality synthetic data for training rather than direct use. I keep a little google spreadsheet with some charts to help visualize the landscape at a glance in terms of capability/price/throughput, bringing in the various index scores as they become available. Hope folks find it useful, feel free to copy and claim as your own. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1foc98Jtbi0-GUsNySddvL0b2a7EuVQw8MoaQlWaDT-w https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1foc98Jtbi0-GUsNySddv...
- bennyg 2y agoThis is an amazing spreadsheet - thank you for sharing!
- isoprophlex 2y agoThats... incredibly thorough. Wow. Thanks for sharing this.
- Philpax 2y agoHoly shit, that's incredible. You should publicise this more! That's a fantastic resource.
- beklein 2y agoThey tried a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40373284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40373284 Sadly little people noticed...
- throwup238 2y agoSadly few people noticed. I don’t normally cosplay as a grammar Nazi but in this case I feel like someone should stand up for the little people :)
- freehorse 2y ago
- swatcoder 2y ago> We look forward to learning more about its strengths, capabilities, and potential applications in real-world settings. If GPT‑4.5 delivers unique value for your use case, your feedback (opens in a new window) will play an important role in guiding our decision. "We don't really know what this is good for, but spent a lot of money and time making it and are under intense pressure to announce new things right now. If you can figure something out, we need you to help us." Not a confident place for an org trying to sustain a $XXXB valuation.
- xnx 2y agoChatGPT has been coasting on name recognition since 4.
- tempaccount420 2y ago> "We don't really know what this is good for, but spent a lot of money and time making it and are under intense pressure to announce new things right now. If you can figure something out, we need you to help us." Where is this quote from?
- hotpocket777 2y agoIt’s not a quote. It is an interpretation or reading of a quote.
- scythe 2y agoI believe it's a "translation" in the sense of Wittgenstein's goal of philosophy: >My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
- serjester 2y agoI suppose this was their final hurrah after two failed attempts at training GPT-5 with the traditional pre-training paradigm. Just confirms reasoning models are the only way forward.
- newfocogi 2y agoI think this is the correct take. There are other axes to scale on AND I expect we'll see smaller and smaller models approach this level of pre-trained performance. But I believe massive pre-training gains have hit clearly diminished returns (until I see evidence otherwise).
- granzymes 2y ago> Compared to OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o3‑mini, GPT‑4.5 is a more general-purpose, innately smarter model. We believe reasoning will be a core capability of future models, and that the two approaches to scaling—pre-training and reasoning—will complement each other. As models like GPT‑4.5 become smarter and more knowledgeable through pre-training, they will serve as an even stronger foundation for reasoning and tool-using agents.
- jstummbillig 2y agoWhat it confirms, I think, is, that we are going to need a lot more chips.
- emseetech 2y agoOr, possibly, we're stuck waiting for another theoretical breakthrough before real progress is made.
- resource0x 2y agobreakthrough in biology
- georgemcbay 2y agoFurther confirmation, IMO, that the idea that any of this leads to anything close to AGI is people getting high on their own supply (in some cases literally). LLMs are a great tool for what is effectively collected knowledge search and summary (so long as you are willing to accept that you have to verify all of the 'knowledge' they spit back because they always have the ability to go off the rails) but they have been hitting the limits on how much better that can get without somehow introducing more real knowledge for close to 2 years now and everything since then is super incremental and IME mostly just benchmark gains and hype as opposed to actually being purely better. I personally don't believe that more GPUs solves this, like, at all. But its great for Nvidia's stock price.
- techorange 2y agoI wonder how much money they’re losing on it too even at those prices.
- nialv7 2y agoLooks like more signal that the scaling "law" is indeed faltering.
- ur-whale 2y agoAI as it stands in 2025 is an amazing technology, but it is not a product at all. As a result, OpenAI simply does not have a business model, even if they are trying to convince the world that they do. My bet is that they're currently burning through other people's capital at an amazing rate, but that they are light-years from profitability They are also being chased by fierce competition and OpenSource which is very close behind. There simply is no moat. It will not end well for investors who sunk money in these large AI startups (unless of course they manage to find a Softbank-style mark to sell the whole thing to), but everyone will benefit from the progress AI will have made during the bubble. So, in the end, OpenAI will have, albeit very unwillingly, fulfilled their original charter of improving humanity's lot.
- jsheard 2y ago> My bet is that they're currently burning through other people's capital at an amazing rate, but that they are light-years from profitability The Information leaked their internal projections a few months ago, and apparently their own estimates have them losing $44B between then and 2029 when they expect to finally turn a profit, maybe.
- j_maffe 2y agoThat's surprisingly small
- whiplash451 2y agoExcept that if OpenAI goes bust, very little of what they did will actually be released to human kind. So their contribution was really to fuel a race for opensource (which they contributed little to). Pretty complex of an argument.
- emptysongglass 2y agoI've been a Plus user for a long time now. My opinion is there is very much a ChatGPT suite of products that come together to make for a mostly delightful experience. Three things I use all the time: - Canvas for proofing and editing my article drafts before publishing. This has replaced an actual human editor for me. - Voice for all sorts of things, mostly for thinking out loud about problems or a quick question about pop culture, what something means in another language, etc. The Sol voice is so approachable for me. - GPTs I can use for things like D&D adventure summaries I need in a certain style every time without any manual prompting.
- jdprgm 2y agoIf it really costs them 30x more surely they must plan on putting pretty significant usage limits on any rollout to the Plus tier and if that is the case i'm not sure what the point is considering it seems primarily a replacement/upgrade for 4o. The cognitive overhead of choosing between what will be 6 different models now on chatGPT and trying to map whether a query is "worth" using a certain model and worrying about hitting usage limits is getting kind of out of control.
- JohnnyMarcone 2y agoTo be fair their roadmap states that gpt-5 will unify everything into one model in "months".
- chollida1 2y ago> GPT 4.5 pricing is insane: > I'm still gonna give it a go, though. Seems like the pricing is pretty rational then?
- phito 2y agoNot if people just try a few prompts then stop using it.
- chollida1 2y agoSure but its in their best interest to lower it then and only then. OpenAI wouldn't be the first company to price something expensive when it first comes out to capitalize on people who are less price sensitive at first and then lower prices to capture a bigger audience. That's all pricing 101 as the saying goes.
- j_maffe 2y agoIf OAI are concerning themselves with collecting a few hundereds from a small group of individuals then they really have nothing better to do
- nyarlathotep_ 2y agoHow much of OAI's reported users are doing exactly this?
- raytopia 2y agoNow the real question about AI automation starts. Is it cheaper to pay a human to do the task or a AI company?
- redox99 2y agoIt still not smart enough to replace for example customer service.
- infecto 2y agoIt's absolutely able to replace the majority of customer service volume which is full of mundane questions.
- beefnugs 2y agoSuch brutal reductionism: how do you calculate an ever growing percentage of customers so pissed at this terrible service that you lose customers forever? Not just one company losing customers... but an entire population completely distrusting and pulling back from any and all companies pulling this trash
- infecto 2y agoHuh? Most call centers these days already use ivr systems and they absolutely are terrible experiences. I along with most people would happily speak with a LLM backed agent to resolve issues. The CS is already a wreck and LLMs beat an ivr any day of the week and have the ability to offer real triaging ability. The only people getting upset are the luddites like yourself.
- fragmede 2y agoHumans have all sorts of issues you have to deal with. Being hungover, not sleeping well, having a personality, being late to work, not being able to work 24/7, very limited ability to copy them. If there's a soulless generic office-droidGPT that companies could hire that would never talk back and would do all sorts of menial work without needing breaks or to use the bathroom, I don't know that we humans stand a chance! I have a bunch of work that needs doing. I can do it myself, or I can hire one person to do it. I gotta train them and manage them and even after I train them theres still only going to be one of them, and it's subject to their availability. On the other hand, if I need to train an AI to do it, but I can copy that AI, and then spin them up/down like on demand computer in the cloud, and not feel remotely bad about spinning them down? It's definitely not there yet, but it's not hard to see the business case for it.
- crooked-v 2y agoDoubly so with how good Claude 3.7 Sonnet is at $3 / 1M tokens.
- Hansenq 2y agoGPT-4.5 is 15-30x more expensive than GPT-4o. Likely that much larger in terms of parameter count too. It’s massive!! With more parameters comes more latent space to build a world model. No wonder its internal world model is so much better than previous SOTA
- wavemode 2y agoThis has been my suspicion for a long time - OpenAI have indeed been working on "GPT5", but training and running it is proving so expensive (and its actual reasoning abilities only marginally stronger than GPT4) that there's just no market for it. It points to an overall plateau being reached in the performance of the transformer architecture.
- goatlover 2y agoCertainly hope so. The tech billionaires are little to excited to achieve AGI and replace the workforce.
- shoubidouwah 2y agoTBH, with the safety/alignment paradigm we have, workforce replacement was not my top concern when we hit AGI. A pause / lull in capabilities would be hugely helpful so that we can figure how not to die along with the lightcone...
- hnuser123456 2y agoIs it inevitable to you that someone will create some kind of techno-god behemoth AI that will figure out how to optimally dominate an entire future light cone starting from the point in spacetime of its self-actualization? Borg or Cylons?
- mupuff1234 2y agoNot sure how why anyone thinks it's possible to fully control AGI, we cant even fully tame a house cat.
- JohnnyMarcone 2y agoI feel like this period has shown that we're not quite ready for a machine god. We'll see if RL hits a wall as well.
- camdenreslink 2y agoThat would certainly reduce my anxiety about the future of my chosen profession.
- hintymad 2y ago> It sounds like it's so expensive and the difference in usefulness is so lacking(?) they're not even gonna keep serving it in the API for long I guess the rationale behind this is paying for the marginal improvement. Maybe the next few percent of improvement is so important to a business that the business is willing to pay a hefty premium.
- shawabawa3 2y agoI wonder if the pricing is partly to discourage distillation, if they suspect r1 was distilled from gpt 4o
- schneehertz 2y agoMainly to prevent you from using it
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 2y agoI can chew through 1MM tokens with a single standard (and optimized) call. This pricing is insane.
- MangoCoffee 2y agoone of the problem seem to be there's no alternative to Nvidia ecosystem. (the gpu + CUDA).
- kridsdale3 2y agoMay I introduce you to Gemini 2.0
- Fnoord 2y agoZLUDA can be used as compatibility glue, also you can use ROCm or even Vulcan with Ollama.
- coliveira 2y agoIn other words, they want people to pay for the privilege of becoming beta testers....
- wiremine 2y ago> GPT 4.5 pricing is insane: Price Input: $75.00 / 1M tokens Cached input: $37.50 / 1M tokens Output: $150.00 / 1M tokens > GPT 4o pricing for comparison: Price Input: $2.50 / 1M tokens Cached input: $1.25 / 1M tokens Output: $10.00 / 1M tokens Their examples don't seem 30x better. :-)
- ren_engineer 2y agohyperscalers in shambles, no clue why they even released this other than the fact they didn't want to admit they wasted an absurd amount of money for no reason
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThe price is obviously 15-30x that of 4o, but I'd just posit that there are some use cases where it may make sense. It probably doesn't make sense for the "open-ended consumer facing chatbot" use case, but for other use cases that are fewer and higher value in nature, it could if it's abilities are considerably better than 4o. For example, there are now a bunch of vendors that sell "respond to RFP" AI products. The number of RFPs that any sales organization responds to is probably no more than a couple a week, but it's a very time-consuming, laborious process. But the payoff is obviously very high if a response results in a closed sale. So here paying 30x for marginally better performance makes perfect sense. I can think of a number of similar "high value, relatively low occurrence" use cases like this where the pricing may not be a big hindrance.
- Manouchehri 2y agoYeah, agreed. We’re one of those types of customers. We wrote an OpenAI API compatible gateway that automatically batches stuff for us, so we get 50% off for basically no extra dev work in our client applications. I don’t care about speed, I care about getting the right answer. The cost is fine as long as the output generates us more profit.
- janoc 2y agoAnd which use case will that make sense then for? Esp. when they aren't even sure whether they will commit to offering this long term? Who would be insane enough to build a product on top of something that may not be there tomorrow? Those products require some extensive work, such a model finetuning on proprietary data. Who is going to invest time & money into something like that when OpenAI says right out of the gate they may not support this model for very long? Basically OpenAI is telegraphing that this is yet another prototype that escaped a lab, not something that is actually ready for use and deployment.
- superq 2y agoComplete legal arguments as well. If I was an attorney, I'd love to have a sophisticated LLM write my crib notes for anything I might do or say in the court room, or even the complete direction that I'd take my case. For some cases, that'd be worth almost any price.
- kristofferR 2y ago"GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x."[1] I don't get it, it is supposedly much cheaper to run? [1] https://cdn.openai.com/gpt-4-5-system-card.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/gpt-4-5-system-card.pdf (page 7, bottom)
- refulgentis 2y agoI speed up my algo that takes a bag-o'-floats by 10x. If I put 100x floats in my bag-o'-floats, its still 10x slower :( (extending beyond that point and beyond ELI5: computational efficiency implies multiplying the floats is faster, but you still need the whole bag o' floats, i.e no RAM efficiency gained, so you're still screwed on big-O for the # of GPUs you need to use)
- acchow 2y ago> It sounds like it's so expensive and the difference in usefulness is so lacking(?) The claimed hallucination rate is dropping from 61% to 37%. That's a "correct" rate increasing from 29% to 63%. Double the correct rate costs 15x the price? That seems absurd, unless you think about how mistakes compound. Even just 2 steps in and you're comparing a 8.4% correct rate vs 40%. 3 automated steps and it's 2.4% vs 25%.
- einrealist 2y agoAnd remember, with increasing accuracy, the cost of validation goes up (not even linear). We expect computers to be right. Its a trust problem. Average users will simply trust the results of LLMs and move on without proper validation. And the way the LLMs are trained to mimic human interaction is not helping either. This will reduce overall quality in society. Its a different thing to work with another human, because there is intention. A human wants to be correct or to mislead me. I am considering this without even thinking about it. And I don't expect expert models to improve things, unless the problem space is really simple (like checking eggs for anomalies).
- isk517 2y ago30x price bump feels like a attempt to pull in as much money as possible before the bubble bursts.
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoTo me, it feels like a PR stunt in response to what the competition is doing. OpenAI is trying to show how they are ahead of others, but they price the new model to minimize its use. Potentially, Anthropic et al. also have amazing models that they aren't yet ready to productionize because of costs.
- OldGreenYodaGPT 2y agoThis is was GPT4 cost when it was released
- ic4l 2y agoDid they already disable it? When using `gpt-4.5-preview` I am getting: > Invalid URL (POST /v1/chat/completions)
- bawolff 2y ago> It sounds like it's so expensive and the difference in usefulness is so lacking(?) they're not even gonna keep serving it in the API for long: Sounds like an attempt at price descrimination. Sell the expensive version to big companies with big budgets who don't care, sell the cheap version to everyone else. Capture both ends of the market.
- campers 2y agoThe price will come down over time as they apply all the techniques to distill it down to a smaller parameter model. Just like GPT4 pricing came down significantly over time.
- osigurdson 2y agoI don't understand the pricing for cached tokens. It seems rather high for looking up something in a cache.
- muzani 2y agoFor comparison, 3 years ago, the most powerful model out there (GPT-3 davinci) was $60/MTok.
- quantadev 2y agoIt's crazy expensive because they want to pull in as much revenue as possible as fast as possible before the Open Source models put them outta business.
- kla-s 2y agoWell to play the devils advocat, i think this is useful to have, at least for ‘Open’Ai to start off from to apply QLora or similar approximations. Bonus they could even do some self learning afterwards with the performance improvements DeepSeek just published and it might have more EQ and less hallucinations than starting from scratch… ie the price might go down big time but there might be significant improvements down the line when starting from such a broad base
- dtnewman 2y agoReally depends on your use case. For low value tasks this is way too expensive. But for context, let’s say a court opinion is an average of 6000 words. Let’s say i want to analyze 10 court opinions and pull some information out that’s relevant to my case. That will run about $1.80 per document or $18 total. I wouldn’t pay that just to edify myself, but i can think of many use cases where it’s still a negligible cost, even if it only does 5% better than the 30x cheaper model.
- dmvdoug 2y agoYou’re also insane if you’re a lawyer trusting gen AI for that. Set aside the fact that people are being caught doing it and judges are clearly getting sick of it (so, it’s a threat to your license). You also have an ethical duty to your client. I really don’t understand lawyers who can sign off on papers without themselves having reviewed the material they’re basing it on. Wild.
- Foobar8568 2y agoSomeone in another comment said that gpt-4 32k had somewhat the same cost (ok 10% cheaper), what was a pain was more the latency and speed than actual cost given the increase in productivity for our usage.
- DonHopkins 2y agoMaybe they started a really long expensive training session, and Elon Musk's DOGE script kiddies somehow broke in and sabotaged it, so it got disrupted and turned into the Eraserhead baby, but they still want to get it out there for a little while before it died to squeeze all the money out of it as possible, because it was so expensive to train. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-kI4Qzj9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ-kI4Qzj9U
- DonHopkins 2y ago>GPT 4.5 pricing is insane: Price Input: $75.00 / 1M tokens Cached input: $37.50 / 1M tokens Output: $150.00 / 1M tokens How many eggs does that include??!
- fvv 2y agousefulness is bound to scope/purpose, even if innovation stops, in 3y (thanks to hw and tuning progress ) when 4o costs 0.1$/M and 4.5 1$/M even being a small improvement ( which is not imo ), you will chose to use 4.5 , exactly like no one now want to use 3.5
- UrineSqueegee 2y agoIt's priced like this because it can generate erotica.
- mayoosh 2y agoIt's also not clear what the definite use case is for this versus other models like o3.
- madduci 2y agoLet's see if DeepSeek will make a distillation of this model as well
- williamsss 2y agoThe performance bump doesn't justify the steep price difference. From a for profit business lens for OpenAI - I understand pushing the price outside the range of side projects, but this pushes it past start ups. Excited to see new stuff released past reasoning models in any case. Hope they can improve the price soon.
- MagicMoonlight 2y agoI put "hello" into it and it billed me 30p for it. Absolutely unusable, more expensive than realtime voice chat.
- FuckButtons 2y agoI suspect this is GPT-5. This is the biggest model they made and they got very little ROI hence the re-branding.
- lend000 2y agoMy understanding is that o1 is a system built on GPT-4o, so this pricing might explain why o3 (the alleged full version) cost so much money to run in the published benchmark tests [0]. It must be using GPT 4.5 or something similar as the underlying model. [0] https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough