How much would you be willing to pay for ChatGPT every month? $50? $75? How about $200 or $2,000?


Thatโ€™s the question facing OpenAI, whose executives we hear have discussed high-priced subscriptions for upcoming large language models, such as OpenAIโ€™s reasoning-focused Strawberry and a new flagship LLM, dubbed Orion. (More on those models here and here.) How much customers are willing to pay for the AI chatbot matters not only to OpenAI but rivals offering similar products, including Google, Anthropic and others.


In early internal discussions at OpenAI, subscription prices ranging up to $2,000 per month were on the table, said one person with direct knowledge of the numbers, though nothing is final. We have strong doubts the final price would be that high.


Still, it's a notable detail because it suggests that the paid version of ChatGPT, which was recently on pace to generate $2 billion in revenue annually, largely from $20-per-month subscriptions, may not be growing fast enough to cover the outsize costs of running the service. Those costs include the expenses of a free tier used by hundreds of millions of people per month. hundreds of millions of people per month.


And more-advanced models such as Strawberry and Orion may be more expensive to train and run than prior models. For instance, weโ€™ve reported that, when given additional time to think, the Strawberry model can answer more complicated questions or puzzles than OpenAIโ€™s current models can. That additional thinking, or processing time, could mean more computing powerโ€”and, therefore, more costs. If thatโ€™s the case, OpenAI may want to pass along some of the costs to customers.


Of course, a high price would also mean OpenAI believes its existing white-collar customers of ChatGPT will find these upcoming models a lot more valuable to their coding, analytics or engineering work. The pricing discussions come as the ChatGPT maker looks to raise billions of dollars in capital to make up for the billions of dollars it's losing per year.


In line with other reports, we've heard existing investor Microsoft is in the mix to put more cash into the startup, perhaps along with Apple and Nvidia, and that Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital is looking to lead the new round, as the Wall Street Journal earlier reported. Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia are already getting something valuable from OpenAI as business partners, so they have a motive to be associated with the fundraising. Their involvement could help convince other investors to help fill the startup's dwindling coffers. (I contacted an OpenAI spokesperson to get their perspective on all this but they had nothing to add.)


Whatever OpenAI decides to charge for upcoming AI service will influence what its rivals do with their products as well. So far, most model developers have settled on subscription business models that charge their chatbot users double-digit amounts per month. A dramatic increase in OpenAI's pricingโ€”and reactions from consumersโ€”could change that.



ChatGPT์˜ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์€ ๋งค๋‹ฌ ์–ผ๋งˆ๊ฐ€ ์ ๋‹นํ• ๊นŒ์š”? $50? $75? ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ฉด $200 ๋˜๋Š” $2,000?


์ด๊ฒƒ์ด ๋ฐ”๋กœ OpenAI๊ฐ€ ์ง๋ฉดํ•œ ์งˆ๋ฌธ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. OpenAI์˜ ์ž„์›๋“ค์ด ํ–ฅํ›„ ์ถœ์‹œ๋  ๋Œ€ํ˜• ์–ธ์–ด ๋ชจ๋ธ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ๊ณ ๊ฐ€์˜ ๊ตฌ๋…๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ๋…ผ์˜ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋“ค์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ ์ค‘์—๋Š” OpenAI์˜ ์ถ”๋ก  ๋Šฅ๋ ฅ์„ ๊ฐ•ํ™”ํ•œ 'Strawberry'์™€ ์ƒˆ๋กœ์šด ์ฃผ๋ ฅ LLM์ธ 'Orion'์ด ํฌํ•จ๋˜์–ด ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (์ด๋“ค ๋ชจ๋ธ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด์„œ๋Š” ์—ฌ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ์ฐธ๊ณ ํ•˜์„ธ์š”.) ๊ณ ๊ฐ์ด AI ์ฑ—๋ด‡์— ์ง€๋ถˆํ•  ์˜ํ–ฅ์ด ์žˆ๋Š” ๊ธˆ์•ก์€ OpenAI๋ฟ๋งŒ ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ ๊ตฌ๊ธ€, Anthropic ๋“ฑ ์œ ์‚ฌ ์ œํ’ˆ์„ ์ œ๊ณตํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ์‚ฌ๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ๋„ ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ๋ฌธ์ œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


OpenAI์˜ ์ดˆ๊ธฐ ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ๋…ผ์˜์—์„œ ์›” ๊ตฌ๋…๋ฃŒ๊ฐ€ ์ตœ๋Œ€ $2,000์— ์ด๋ฅผ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ์–ธ๊ธ‰์ด ์žˆ์—ˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋‚ด๋ถ€ ๊ด€๊ณ„์ž๊ฐ€ ์ „ํ–ˆ์ง€๋งŒ, ์•„์ง ์ตœ์ข… ๊ฒฐ์ •์€ ๋‚ด๋ ค์ง€์ง€ ์•Š์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋Ÿฌ๋‚˜ ์ตœ์ข… ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์ด ๊ทธ๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ๋†’๊ฒŒ ์ฑ…์ •๋  ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์€ ๋‚ฎ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋ณด๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


๊ทธ๋Ÿผ์—๋„ ๋ถˆ๊ตฌํ•˜๊ณ , ์ด๋Š” ChatGPT์˜ ์œ ๋ฃŒ ๋ฒ„์ „์ด ๊ทธ๋™์•ˆ ์›” $20 ๊ตฌ๋…๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ํ†ตํ•ด ์—ฐ๊ฐ„ 20์–ต ๋‹ฌ๋Ÿฌ์˜ ์ˆ˜์ต์„ ์˜ฌ๋ฆด ๊ฒƒ์œผ๋กœ ์˜ˆ์ƒ๋˜์—ˆ์Œ์—๋„ ๋ถˆ๊ตฌํ•˜๊ณ , ์„œ๋น„์Šค๋ฅผ ์šด์˜ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ๋“œ๋Š” ๋ง‰๋Œ€ํ•œ ๋น„์šฉ์„ ์ถฉ๋‹นํ•˜๊ธฐ์—๋Š” ์„ฑ์žฅ ์†๋„๊ฐ€ ์ถฉ๋ถ„ํ•˜์ง€ ์•Š๋‹ค๋Š” ์‹ ํ˜ธ์ผ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์—ฌ๊ธฐ์—๋Š” ์ˆ˜์–ต ๋ช…์˜ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ๋งค๋‹ฌ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฌด๋ฃŒ ์„œ๋น„์Šค์— ์†Œ์š”๋˜๋Š” ๋น„์šฉ๋„ ํฌํ•จ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  Strawberry์™€ Orion๊ณผ ๊ฐ™์€ ๊ณ ๊ธ‰ ๋ชจ๋ธ๋“ค์€ ์ด์ „ ๋ชจ๋ธ๋“ค๋ณด๋‹ค ํ›ˆ๋ จ ๋ฐ ์šด์˜ ๋น„์šฉ์ด ๋” ๋งŽ์ด ๋“ค ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์ด ํฝ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด, ์šฐ๋ฆฌ๊ฐ€ ์ „ํ•œ ๋ฐ”์— ๋”ฐ๋ฅด๋ฉด Strawberry ๋ชจ๋ธ์€ ์ถ”๊ฐ€์ ์ธ ์‚ฌ๊ณ  ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ์ฃผ๋ฉด OpenAI์˜ ํ˜„์žฌ ๋ชจ๋ธ์ด ํ•ด๊ฒฐํ•˜์ง€ ๋ชปํ•˜๋Š” ๋ณต์žกํ•œ ์งˆ๋ฌธ์ด๋‚˜ ํผ์ฆ์„ ํ’€ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ์ถ”๊ฐ€์ ์ธ ์‚ฌ๊ณ , ์ฆ‰ ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์€ ๋” ๋งŽ์€ ์ปดํ“จํŒ… ํŒŒ์›Œ๋ฅผ ํ•„์š”๋กœ ํ•˜๊ณ , ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋” ๋งŽ์€ ๋น„์šฉ์ด ๋“ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งŒ์•ฝ ๊ทธ๋ ‡๋‹ค๋ฉด, OpenAI๋Š” ๊ทธ ๋น„์šฉ์˜ ์ผ๋ถ€๋ฅผ ๊ณ ๊ฐ์—๊ฒŒ ์ „๊ฐ€ํ•˜๋ ค ํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


๋ฌผ๋ก , ๋†’์€ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์€ OpenAI๊ฐ€ ํ˜„์žฌ์˜ ํ™”์ดํŠธ์นผ๋ผ ๊ณ ๊ฐ๋“ค์ด ์ด ์ƒˆ๋กœ์šด ๋ชจ๋ธ๋“ค์ด ์ฝ”๋”ฉ, ๋ถ„์„, ์—”์ง€๋‹ˆ์–ด๋ง ์ž‘์—…์— ํ›จ์”ฌ ๋” ๊ฐ€์น˜๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ•  ๊ฒƒ์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ๋ฏฟ๋Š”๋‹ค๋Š” ์˜๋ฏธ์ด๊ธฐ๋„ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ ๋…ผ์˜๋Š” ChatGPT ์ œ์ž‘์‚ฌ๊ฐ€ ๋งค๋…„ ์ˆ˜์‹ญ์–ต ๋‹ฌ๋Ÿฌ์˜ ์†์‹ค์„ ๋ณด์ „ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ์ˆ˜์‹ญ์–ต ๋‹ฌ๋Ÿฌ์˜ ์ž๋ณธ์„ ์กฐ๋‹ฌํ•˜๋ ค๋Š” ๊ณผ์ •์—์„œ ์ด๋ฃจ์–ด์ง€๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.


๋‹ค๋ฅธ ๋ณด๋„์™€ ์ผ์น˜ํ•˜๊ฒŒ, ์šฐ๋ฆฌ๋Š” ๊ธฐ์กด ํˆฌ์ž์ž์ธ Microsoft๊ฐ€ Apple, Nvidia์™€ ํ•จ๊ป˜ ๋” ๋งŽ์€ ์ž๊ธˆ์„ OpenAI์— ํˆฌ์žํ•  ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์ด ์žˆ์œผ๋ฉฐ, Josh Kushner์˜ Thrive Capital์ด ์ด๋ฒˆ ํˆฌ์ž ๋ผ์šด๋“œ๋ฅผ ์ด๋Œ ๊ฒƒ์œผ๋กœ ๋ณด์ธ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋“ค์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. Wall Street Journal์€ ์ด๋ฏธ ์ด๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋„ํ•œ ๋ฐ” ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia๋Š” OpenAI์™€์˜ ๋น„์ฆˆ๋‹ˆ์Šค ํŒŒํŠธ๋„ˆ๋กœ์„œ ์ด๋ฏธ ๊ฐ€์น˜ ์žˆ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„ ์–ป๊ณ  ์žˆ์œผ๋ฏ€๋กœ, ์ž๊ธˆ ์กฐ๋‹ฌ์— ์ฐธ์—ฌํ•  ๋™๊ธฐ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋“ค์˜ ์ฐธ์—ฌ๋Š” ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ํˆฌ์ž์ž๋“ค์ด ์ž๊ธˆ์ด ๋ถ€์กฑํ•œ ์Šคํƒ€ํŠธ์—…์— ์ž๊ธˆ์„ ์ง€์›ํ•˜๋„๋ก ์„ค๋“ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ๋„์›€์ด ๋  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (OpenAI ๋Œ€๋ณ€์ธ์—๊ฒŒ ์ด์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ์˜๊ฒฌ์„ ์š”์ฒญํ–ˆ์œผ๋‚˜ ์ถ”๊ฐ€ํ•  ๋‚ด์šฉ์€ ์—†๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ „ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.)


ํ–ฅํ›„ AI ์„œ๋น„์Šค์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด OpenAI๊ฐ€ ์–ผ๋งˆ๋ฅผ ์ฒญ๊ตฌํ• ์ง€์— ๋”ฐ๋ผ ๊ฒฝ์Ÿ์‚ฌ๋“ค์ด ์ž์‚ฌ ์ œํ’ˆ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ์–ด๋–ค ๊ฒฐ์ •์„ ๋‚ด๋ฆด์ง€๋„ ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฐ›๊ฒŒ ๋  ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ง€๊ธˆ๊นŒ์ง€ ๋Œ€๋ถ€๋ถ„์˜ ๋ชจ๋ธ ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ์ž๋“ค์€ ์‚ฌ์šฉ์ž๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ ์›” ๋‹จ์œ„๋กœ ๋‘ ์ž๋ฆฟ์ˆ˜ ๊ธˆ์•ก์„ ์ฒญ๊ตฌํ•˜๋Š” ๊ตฌ๋… ๋ชจ๋ธ์„ ์„ ํƒํ•ด ์™”์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. OpenAI์˜ ๊ฐ€๊ฒฉ์ด ๊ธ‰๊ฒฉํžˆ ์ƒ์Šนํ•˜๊ณ  ์ด์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ์†Œ๋น„์ž์˜ ๋ฐ˜์‘์ด ๋‚˜์˜จ๋‹ค๋ฉด ์ด ์ƒํ™ฉ์ด ๋ฐ”๋€” ์ˆ˜๋„ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.