What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

The author ran a real project—screening 10,000 papers with an LLM—and saw the cost drop from thousands of dollars to just over $100 in a few months. Pulling Pareto frontier data from Artificial Analysis, he found the per-task price for a given intelligence level fell 56x in under six months, from $1.22 to $0.022, and the decline is accelerating. He uses GPT-5.6 family pelican-on-a-bicycle SVGs to show what different index scores look like, and argues that while frontier models unlock new tasks, collapsing costs unlock high-volume applications.

Why it matters: A first-person experiment with real billing data and third-party pricing benchmarks that quantifies the intelligence cost drop at 56x in under six months—far more concrete than generic 'prices are falling' commentary. Not scored higher because the author is from a neuroinforma...