Assertion Contradicted AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Sonwalkar: GPT-5 costs half as much as o3

Rahul Sonwalkar · Weekly Recap: Apple Sitting on $100B, Disney Enters The AI Race, Marc Andreessen, All About GPT-5 · Aug 9, 2025 · at 1:58:07

Rahul Sonwalkar, founder of Julius AI, discusses the pricing and margin impact of OpenAI's GPT-5 model on application layer startups.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.4s

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“Also it's half the cost of O three. So it's much cheaper. So it helps you, helps your margins.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

GPT-5 costs half as much as OpenAI's o3 model.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

At its launch on August 7, 2025, GPT-5 API pricing was set at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens. At that time, OpenAI's o3 model had an active pricing rate (effective June 2025) of $2.00 per million input tokens and $8.00 per million output tokens. Consequently, GPT-5's input cost was 62.5% of o3's input cost, and its output cost was actually 25% higher ($10.00 vs. $8.00) than o3's output cost. Even evaluated against o3's original launch pricing from April 2025 ($10.00 input / $40.00 output), GPT-5 was 12.5% and 25% of o3's costs, respectively, neither of which is 'half the cost'. The speaker appears to have conflated o3 with GPT-4o, whose input token pricing ($2.50/M) was exactly double GPT-5's input token rate ($1.25/M).

OpenAI launched GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens.
OpenAI o3 pricing as of June 2025 was $2.00 per million input tokens and $8.00 per million output tokens.
GPT-5 input pricing was 62.5% of o3's input pricing, while GPT-5 output pricing exceeded o3's output pricing by 25%.

Checked against

[1] wikipedia.org [2] openai.com [3] nextomoro.com [4] openrouter.ai [5] openrouter.ai [6] kingy.ai [7] securityonline.info [8] apidog.com

OpenAI o3 cost input output tokens pricing "gpt-5" API pricing "input" "output" "August 2025" "million tokens" OpenAI GPT 5 launch "GPT-5" "August 7, 2025" "pricing" API "$1.25" OR "$10" OR "$2" OR "$8" "o3" "API pricing" "August 2025" OR "April 2025" OpenAI OpenAI o3 API pricing per million tokens

assessed as of 2026-09-02

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Mentioned

GPT-5 o3 OpenAI

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