OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said one topic was front and center at the billionaires’ summer camp in Sun Valley: AI spend.
Speaking with CNBC at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference, Altman said this was the first year AI spend has been a “very big topic” at the conference.
“Everyone’s asking 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 a major consideration for the AI lab when developing its latest models, the GPT-5.6 family, he said. The new models, released on Thursday, include the flagship Sol model, the balanced everyday Terra model, and the cost-efficient Luna model.
Altman said GPT-5.6 Sol is “54% more token efficient on agentic coding tasks,” and OpenAI developed it with cost and speed in mind. The executive did not specify what the 54% figure was compared to.
He said “every enterprise” is now thinking about “spend and the value they’re getting in exchange for AI.”
The Sun Valley conference kicked off on Tuesday, bringing together the world’s biggest tech leaders in the picturesque resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho. This year’s attendee list 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 enterprises are increasingly considering how to achieve better returns on their AI spend, with several executives publicly sharing their tactics for getting 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 prompts to the most appropriate models to avoid unnecessarily burning AI tokens.
Cloud platform Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch, said to TechCrunch in an interview released earlier this week that companies need to start partnering with different AI labs for different parts of their AI stack. He said they should use models across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Chinese players to get the best value.
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