OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said one topic was in the spotlight at the billionaires’ summer camp in Sun Valley: AI spending. Speaking to CNBC at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference, Altman said this was the first year that AI spending was a “very important topic” at the conference. “Everyone is wondering what
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said one topic was in the spotlight at the billionaires’ summer camp in Sun Valley: AI spending.
Speaking to CNBC at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference, Altman said this was the first year that AI spending was a “very important topic” at the conference.
“Everyone is wondering what we can do to help reduce spend or increase value,” he said. He added that OpenAI is seeing people start to care about efficiency and getting a good return on their AI investments.
This was an important consideration for the AI lab when developing its latest models, the GPT-5.6 family, he said. The new models, launched on Thursday, include the flagship Sol model, the balanced everyday Terra model and the cost-effective Luna model.
Altman said GPT-5.6 Sol is “54% more symbolic efficient in agent encoding tasks” and OpenAI developed it with cost and speed in mind. The executive did not specify what the 54% figure is compared to.
He said that “every company” is now thinking about “the expense and the value they get in exchange for AI.”
The Sun Valley conference kicked off Tuesday, bringing together the world’s top technology leaders in the picturesque resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho. This year’s list of attendees included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Altman’s comments to CNBC come as companies increasingly consider how to achieve better returns on their AI spending, and several executives are publicly sharing their tactics to get more bang for their buck.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that he was experimenting with cheaper Chinese models as defaults for his engineers and routing their directions to the most appropriate models to avoid needlessly burning AI tokens.
Cloud platform Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told TechCrunch in an interview published earlier this week that companies should start partnering with different AI labs for different parts of their AI stack. He said they should use models on OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Chinese players to get the best value.