OpenAI has published a new post about abundant intelligence, which sounds much nicer than data centers, power contracts, mountains of GPUs, and endless fundraising. Apparently, spending a fortune on artificial intelligence just needed better branding.
The company describes a tidy cycle. Better models attract more users, those users generate more revenue, and that revenue pays for even more infrastructure until useful intelligence becomes cheaper and available to everyone.
You see, that story is extremely convenient for a company with a seemingly endless appetite for money and compute. OpenAI needs to commit to infrastructure years in advance, even though nobody really knows how much demand will exist or whether customers will keep paying enough to support it.
There are some interesting numbers buried in the post. OpenAI says its models now reach more than one billion active users and over two million businesses, while GPT-5.6 Sol supposedly helped reduce serving costs by 20 percent and improve token generation efficiency by more than 15 percent.
Those claims certainly help the sales pitch, but they come directly from OpenAI. The company is essentially grading its own homework while using the results to explain why it should keep spending at an extraordinary pace.
OpenAI also argues that customers should stop focusing so much on token prices. Instead, they should calculate the total cost of completing a task, including retries, mistakes, delays, and human oversight.
That argument is not completely wrong. A more expensive model could be cheaper overall when it gets the job done correctly, although it is hardly surprising that OpenAI would prefer customers to think about outcomes rather than stare too closely at the price list.
The real purpose of this post seems obvious. OpenAI wants customers, partners, and investors to see its infrastructure binge as disciplined growth rather than a very expensive gamble built on assumptions about future demand.
Maybe the gamble pays off and intelligence really does become abundant. For now, however, abundant intelligence sounds like a fancy new name for an absolutely enormous bill.
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