The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly
A report from Epoch AI highlights that the cost of achieving high-level AI performance has plummeted by over 700 times in less than 18 months. This trend suggests that frontier AI models are becoming significantly more efficient and affordable to operate over time.
Why it matters
Rapidly falling inference costs accelerate the democratization of advanced AI, potentially neutralizing the competitive advantage of closed-source models.
An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman:
To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.
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