Sam Altman warns rising AI costs are squeezing big companies
OpenAI's Sam Altman says the price of using AI tools is rising fast, and it's starting to squeeze big companies.
Firms like Uber and Walmart are now limiting how much their teams use AI because they're blowing past budgets.
Tokens, basically units that track how much you use AI, are costing more as usage grows.
Uber reportedly exhausted annual AI budget
Altman pointed out that just a few months ago, spending on AI wasn't really an issue for businesses, but now it's a serious headache.
Uber reportedly spent its entire annual AI budget in only a few months, and another company may have paid roughly $500 million in one month alone for Claude AI use.
Token consumption has exploded too; OpenAI's top user went from 100,000 tokens a month six and a half years ago to 100 billion per month today.
Altman said companies are asking him to make AI token use more efficient.