{"slug": "the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly", "title": "The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly", "summary": "An Epoch AI report by Emberson and Roodman found that the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of about 47% per quarter over the past three years, a 13-fold drop every year. The report cites OpenAI o3 costing roughly $0.30 per question to reach 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna reached roughly the same score for about $0.0004 in mid-2026, a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months. The finding indicates that a fixed level of AI capability increasingly requires far less inference spending, not only that models are getting smarter.", "body_md": "# The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly\n\nAn amazing [Epoch AI report](https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought) from Emberson and Roodman:\n\n- Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history.\n\nTo 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.\n\nThus, it’s not just that the models are getting smarter. A given level of intelligence is also requiring dramatically less inference expenditure. This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance. Smarter and cheaper.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly", "canonical_source": "https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling", "published_at": "2026-09-23 11:17:32+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-23 11:32:20.772694+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research", "large-language-models", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Epoch AI", "Emberson", "Roodman", "OpenAI", "o3", "GPT-5.6 Luna", "GPQA Diamond"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling-rapidly.jsonld"}}