The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly
The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly by Alex Tabarrok September 23, 2026 at 7:17 am in Current Affairs Data Source Religion Science An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman: Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history. To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.
- ▪The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly by Alex Tabarrok September 23, 2026 at 7:17 am in Current Affairs Data Source Religion Science An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman: Over the past three years, the cost of a given
- ▪That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history.
- ▪To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.
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| Original publisher | Marginal REVOLUTION |
| Canonical URL | https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/the-price-of-intelligence-is-falling.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:08:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T14:09:30.753Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T14:09:30.753Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7JjR6WVeZuws · 1 stories |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly by Alex Tabarrok September 23, 2026 at 7:17 am in Current Affairs Data Source Religion Science An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman: Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history. To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months. Thus, it’s not just that the models are getting smarter. A given level of intelligence is also requiring dramatically less inference expenditure.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Marginal REVOLUTION.
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