AI costs fall ~47% per quarter — 54x faster than electricity, but R&D elasticity is average
RishiBommasani · x · 2026-09-24
Epoch AI finds AI costs at a given performance level have fallen 47%/quarter since 2023 — 4x faster than DNA sequencing, 6x faster than compute, 18x faster than lithium batteries, and 54x faster than electricity (pre-1973). But plotted against cumulative R&D rather than time, AI's price elasticity to R&D investment is merely average: the unprecedented price fall reflects unprecedented R&D spending, not unusual returns.
More from Infra
- If 1 billion people ran personal AI agents, CPU and memory demands would be staggering — firstadopter · 2026-09-24
- Side project ports most video generation models from PyTorch to Jax for TPU — ceciletamura · 2026-09-24
- Cloudflare's bot checks called out for wasting agents' time and tokens — msg · 2026-09-24
- Qualcomm ships early Linux developer preview for Snapdragon X2 series — ryanshrout · 2026-09-24
- DuckDB now ships built-in inside dbt v2 on the Rust-based Fusion engine — josh_wills · 2026-09-24
- First Cybercab Built With Locally Made Nickel Cathode From Tesla's Gigafactory Texas — elonmusk · 2026-09-24