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AI capability is getting cheaper to reach, not just bigger. Epoch AI tracked what it cost in tokens to hit the same score — about 27% accuracy on its FrontierMath benchmark — first with o4-mini in April 2025, then with GPT-5.2 in December 2025, and found AI capability got roughly 3x cheaper to reach in eight months, part of a ~5-10x per year cost-decline trend
Verified 2026-08-26
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More on Models
- Frontier AI models are catching up fast to benchmarks meant to resist them. A year ago they scored under 10% on Humanity's Last Exam, a 2,700-question test designed to be hard for AI and favorable to human experts. Now accuracy has reached 38.3% on Humanity's Last Exam, up from under 10% a year earlier
- Epoch AI's Capabilities Index scores frontier models on one aggregate scale, and fits a break in the trend at April 2024, when reasoning models and reinforcement learning took over frontier training. Before the break the frontier gained 8.3 index points a year; after it, 15.5 points a year, 1.85 times as fast
- Epoch AI tested three commercial AI detectors — Pangram, GPTZero, Originality.ai — pinned to their June 2026 versions. Against plain machine-generated text they catch nearly everything, but shown five samples of a specific author's writing and told to imitate the style, AI detectors missed 13% of style-imitated AI passages, versus under 1% of plain AI text