September 23, 2026
AI gets cheaper for the same task: price drops 47% per quarter
Since 2023, LLM API pricing for the same results has fallen by about 47% per quarter, Epoch AI reported on September 22. In its March analysis, the annual price decline ranged from 9x to 900x, with a median of 50x. The fastest declines came in the final year of the sample.
Epoch AI
@epochairesearch
AI is getting cheaper faster than any technology that changed the world. Since 2023, the price for the same level of results has fallen by about 47% per quarter. That is 4 times faster than DNA sequencing, 6 times faster than computing, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and 54 times faster than electricity before 1973.
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On March 14, 2023, GPT-4-0314 scored 67.0 on HumanEval at $37.50 per 1 million tokens. On December 13, 2024, Phi 4 scored 87.0 at $0.12.
Epoch AI compared the same threshold. The researchers used six benchmarks, including HumanEval, and selected the cheapest model that reached the required result. They calculated the price of input and output tokens at a 3:1 ratio. Reasoning models were excluded: they generate more tokens, so price per token gives a misleading picture.
The analysis code, source data, and ready-made CSV files are in the Epoch AI repository alongside two notebooks.
