Permitted by Physics
The cost of AI intelligence has dramatically decreased, dropping by 280 times from November 2022 to October 2024. This significant price reduction has gone largely unnoticed despite its potential impact on society. The article discusses the implications of this change and contrasts it with the typical narratives found in cyberpunk fiction.
- ▪In November 2022, it cost about twenty dollars for a million tokens of GPT-3.5-level reasoning.
- ▪By October 2024, the same quality of thinking cost only seven cents.
- ▪The price drop represents a 280-fold collapse in the cost of AI intelligence over a span of twenty-three months.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Permitted by Physics Posted May 24, 2026 By Christian Engel 18 min readSometime in the last two years the price of intelligence fell by a factor of two hundred and eighty, and almost nobody noticed.In November 2022 it cost about twenty dollars to get a million tokens of GPT-3.5-level reasoning out of a machine. By October 2024 the same quality of thinking cost seven cents. A 280-fold collapse in the price of the thing our entire civilization is supposedly built on, in twenty-three months.1 If the price of oil had done that, it would have been the only story on Earth.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Christian Engel.
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