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The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly

▲ 81 points • 85 comments • by gotmedium • 2w ago • HN discussion ↗

Pangram verdict · v3.3

We believe that this text is a mix of AI and human-written content.

59 %

AI likelihood · overall

Mixed
32% human-written 68% AI-generated
SEGMENTS · HUMAN 1 of 2
SEGMENTS · AI 1 of 2
WORD COUNT 146
PEAK AI % 75% · §2
Analyzed
Sep 23
backend: pangram/v3.3
Segments scanned
2 windows
avg 73 words each
Distribution
32 / 68%
human / AI fraction
Verdict
Mixed
Pangram v3.3

Article text · 146 words · 2 segments analyzed

Human AI-generated
§1 Human · 26%

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.

§2 AI · 75%

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. This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance. Smarter and cheaper.