With AI models becoming more and more powerful, the cost of inference (at least for frontier models) is staying about the same (or increases) and the models consuming vastly more tokens for a given task. This being said, Toby Ord did a fascinating analysis of the cost of running AI agents as a function of “cost of labour” – and found that agents sometimes cost much more than human labour (“How is the ‘hourly’ cost of AI agents changing over time?”). In sum:
- This provides moderate evidence that:
- the costs to achieve the time horizons are growing exponentially,
- even the hourly costs are rising exponentially,
- the hourly costs for some models are now close to human costs.
