OPENAI LAUNCHES FLEX PROCESSING FOR CHEAPER, SLOWER AI TASKS

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

OpenAI's Flex processing is a new API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and occasional resource unavailability. It is available in beta for the company's recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models. Aimed at lower-priority and non-production tasks, the feature reduces API costs by exactly half. In the email announcing the launch of Flex processing, OpenAI also indicated that developers in tiers 1 to 3 of its usage tiers hierarchy will have to complete ID verification to access o3.