An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman:
- Over the former three years, the disbursal of a stated flat of AI achievement has fallen an average of several 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold autumn all twelvemonth – a faster charge than any another transformative innovation in history.
To provision an example, OpenAI o3 disbursal concerning $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, during GPT-5.6 Luna attained approximately the identical mark for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a approximately 725-fold decrease in under 18 months.
Thus, it’s not fair that the models are getting smarter. A stated flat of intellect is additionally requiring dramatically small conclusion expenditure. This is one logic the open-model danger is not as ample as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are quickly becoming cheaper to run at any stated flat of performance. Smarter and cheaper.
