The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly
4 hours ago
- The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has been dropping by approximately 47% per quarter over the past three years, a 13-fold reduction annually—faster than any other transformative technology in history.
- A concrete example: OpenAI's o3 cost $0.30 per question to achieve 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna achieved the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026, representing a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.
- Frontier models are not only becoming smarter but also dramatically cheaper to run at any given performance level, which reduces the threat posed by open models since the leading models maintain a cost advantage.