Epoch Brief: AI Costs Fall 47% per Quarter, Chips Could Run Nearly 2 Billion Agents
Epoch AI · rss · 2026-10-09
Epoch AI's October 8 brief highlights: shipped AI chips through 2027 could support 30–170M concurrent frontier agents (or nearly 2B on cheap models); the cost of fixed AI performance has fallen 47% per quarter (13x/year)—4x faster than DNA sequencing; six leading Chinese AI companies earn about one-tenth of OpenAI+Anthropic's combined AI revenue; trade data suggests $3B+ of chips were smuggled to China via Malaysia; AI acknowledgments in math preprints jumped from 4% to 25% in four months; OpenAI researchers' median daily coding-agent spend hit $600 by August; new benchmarks include an IKEA assembly spatial test (top score 28%→80% in 10 months), a board-game continuous-learning benchmark where GPT-6 Astra leads Claude Opus 5, and InnovationEval showing AI can't yet automate AI R&D.
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