AI thought price falls 13x per year, Epoch AI finds — 725x drop in 18 months

Epoch AI · rss · 2026-09-28

Epoch AI published a summary of its report on how fast the "price of thought" — the cheapest cost of hitting a given benchmark score — is falling:

• Over five years, cost per performance level has dropped 13x per year (47% per quarter): 4x faster than DNA sequencing, 6x faster than compute, 18x faster than lithium batteries, 54x faster than electricity.
• Example: in January 2025, o3 hit 75% on GPQA Diamond at $0.30/question; under 18 months later GPT-5.6 Luna matched it at $0.0004/question — a 725-fold drop, like a $50,000 car falling to $69.
• By domain: math prices fall fastest (50–52% per quarter, 16–19x/year), game-based puzzles slower (39–43% per quarter).
• The rate of decline slows with age: 66% per quarter when a level first achieved, halving to 32% two years later — likely a brief premium before competition drives prices down.
• The trend traces back to commercial LLM inference in November 2021; data and code are on GitHub.

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