AI inference costs falling 1000× in 2 years, heading toward free intelligence

Falling AI inference costs suggest intelligence may soon become too cheap to meter, the text claims. GPT-4-class inference prices reportedly fell about 1000× over roughly two years. ARC Prize reports about a 390× drop in cost per task for near-state-of-the-art ARC-AGI-1 performance over about a year, from o3 preview at roughly 88% and an estimated $4,500 per task to GPT-5.2 Pro at 90.5% and $11.64 per task. If these trends continue, the marginal cost of white-collar cognition could become orders of magnitude cheaper than human labor once human-level AI is reached.