AI is getting cheaper faster than any other transformative technology

Key points

• Over the past five years, the price of thought — the cost for an AI to hit a particular benchmark score — has fallen 13× per year.1
• It seems to be a faster pace than any other transformative technology has matched: it’s four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity.1
• To investigate this trend, we calculated the cheapest way of hitting a given score on five AI performance benchmarks covering mathematics, hard sciences, and games of skill (e.g., chess) at different points in time over the last three years.1
• Coarser evidence suggests that this rate goes back to the dawn of commercial LLM inference in November 2021, when OpenAI fully released GPT-3.1

Sources (1)

• [1]AI is getting cheaper faster than any other transformative technology
  Epoch AI: Gradient Updates · Sep 28, 03:33 PM

  Because that’s how fast AI is getting cheaper.

  Over the past five years, the price of thought — the cost for an AI to hit a particular benchmark score — has fallen 13× per year.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.