The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly

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.

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.