Epoch AI measures the cost of a fixed AI capability level falling 13x a year
Epoch AI (via r/singularity, 138 upvotes)·medium signal
Epoch AI's Luke Emberson and David Roodman published 'The Plunging Price of Thought' on September 22. It finds that the cost of a given performance level fell about 47% per quarter over three years, measured across benchmarks including GPQA Diamond, FrontierMath and AIME. The decline runs about 66% per quarter right after a new state of the art and slows to 32% per quarter two years later. One GPQA Diamond performance level got 725x cheaper between January 2025 and mid-2026. The Sol/Luna and Opus 5.5 price cuts on the same day are that curve playing out.