IIRC their biggest cost they're "hiding" in their financials by doing creative accounting is inference (putting it into marketing and whatnot, in the billions)... if they can't hide it in their S-1 then they have to rationalize it, either by a) increasing the prices (not gonna happen, with token based billing orgs are already watching their codex spends) or b) lowering the inference costs. You can lower that by "soft optimizing" (dumbing down) your models but then you have the other players breathing down your neck (see quick rise of Claude), or actually optimizing, in software and in hardware. We're like 5 years into the rise of LLMs, there's not THAT much left on the table unless you write to the metal you specifically designed for your models (and I'm pretty sure the lack of "nvidia tax" would help with covering most of the r&d costs of a custom solution, at least in the long term).

50% cheaper inference without losses in fidelity would unquestionably be a massive win for OpenAI.