Epoch AI: Cost of Equal AI Quality Drops ~13x Per Year
According to Epoch AI research, the price of achieving the same AI quality level drops roughly 47% per quarter — translating to approximately a 13x decline per year. The sharpest cost reductions occur right after a new capability appears, with the rate slowing from ~66% per quarter for frontier-level tasks to ~32% per quarter after two years. Epoch’s benchmarks include the example of OpenAI o3 scoring >25% on FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 at roughly $0.55, while GPT-5.6 Luna reached the same level ~18 months later for ~$0.0015. The core takeaway: what is exclusive to the most expensive models today becomes a mass-market, near-free feature remarkably fast.
Related: OpenAI Price Cuts Could Complicate Anthropic’s IPO Pitch, OpenAI Updates API Pricing for GPT-5.6 Family