Developer Chris told OpenAI's Codex — the coding agent that can now control your browser — to "go make $5." And it did. Over 22 hours, Codex autonomously found a bug, wrote a fix, communicated with the project maintainer, and verified the payment. Its final haul: $16.88. Chris was thrilled. "The era of AI working for us has arrived," he proclaimed.
https://twitter.com/chatgpt21/status/2053556436475461786
But the internet's accountants were quick to do the math. Running a top-tier AI agent for nearly a full day burns through an eye-watering amount of compute. One developer calculated the cost at roughly $2,000 — for a $16.88 bounty. A meme quickly circulated, mocking the "working at a loss" model: burning two grand in compute to pocket pocket change.
Chris fired back, pointing out that he didn't pay that $2,000 out of pocket. He used a $20 monthly subscription, effectively offloading the compute cost to the AI platform. The catch? His account got hit with rate limits twice during the job. Still, Chris sees a gold rush ahead. "Right now, running GPT-5.5 costs the platform about $30 per million output tokens — it's a loss leader. But when that drops to $2 next year, fully automated bounty hunting becomes a win-win profit machine."