OpenAI CFO says its AI is cheaper than open-source rivals

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar laid out an aggressive enterprise strategy on Monday, telling investors at Goldman Sachs's The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ↘ 0.20% annual Communacopia + Technology Conference that the company is pushing its AI into chip design, life sciences, and financial services while claiming a cost advantage over open-source rivals.

Enterprise Growth and Price Cuts

Speaking in San Francisco, Friar said enterprise revenue grew 32% from June to July, outpacing the 20% growth in overall annualized revenue during the same period, according to Reuters. Enterprise and consumer revenue reached roughly equal footing by mid-year, ahead of the company's internal target of hitting that balance by year-end.reuters+1

Friar pointed to the company's recent 80% price cut to its GPT-5.6 Luna model — its fastest and lowest-cost offering — as a driver of growth, saying the reduction led to roughly a tenfold increase in usage. Luna now costs 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. Friar argued that deploying Luna is now cheaper than running Chinese open-weight alternatives such as Z.ai's GLM 5.3 through cloud providers. "If you're deploying Luna and compare that to GLM 5.3, for example, on a cloud layer, we are cheaper," she said.finance.yahoo+2

AI-Designed Chips

Friar highlighted OpenAI's own experience using its models in chip development. The company's Jalapeño chip, built in partnership with Broadcom ↗ 2.98%, reached tape-out — the stage when a design is finalized and sent to a factory — within nine months. OpenAI has described Jalapeño as its first "Intelligence Processor," an accelerator designed specifically for large language model inference. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has said the chip shows roughly 50% cost savings compared with typical AI GPUs.openai+1

OpenAI's Codex coding tool now has 25 million users, Friar added.reuters

Advertising Ambitions

In a separate set of remarks at the same conference, Friar outlined OpenAI's advertising ambitions, describing ChatGPT as "if Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.02% and Meta ↘ 0.53% had a baby," according to Business Insider. She said the company's ads business is generating revenue at an annualized rate of $1 billion after just seven months. Friar credited the concept to former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo and said ChatGPT combines the "high intent" of search with personalized context drawn from user memory. "When you put those two things together, the ability to have a really potent ad platform is clearly there," she said.businessinsider