Morning Edition · Friday, July 24, 2026Published at 1:33 AM EDT · New York

OpenAI Chairman Argues Token Efficiency, Not Training Cost, Decides the Open-Weight Question

Bret Taylor's comments followed attention on Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3, and rest on an efficiency claim OpenAI has not quantified publicly.

OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor argued in a CNBC interview that the cost advantage of open-weight models is overstated, because what determines real cost is token efficiency, not how cheaply a model was trained. Frontier models, he said, use fe…