# The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly

> 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: 2026-09-23 11:17:32+00:00

# The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly

An amazing [Epoch AI report](https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought) from Emberson and Roodman:

- 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.

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.

Thus, 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.