Running a standard AI benchmark task now costs about 15 cents. That number alone doesn’t mean much until you realize the same task cost roughly 97 times more just a year and a half ago.
ARK Invest unpacked this staggering cost decline on Episode 140 of its podcast, The Brainstorm, laying out what it means for AI competition, enterprise adoption, and the broader market.
The 97x collapse in AI costs
The core data point from ARK’s analysis is hard to overstate. AI inference costs have dropped by up to 97 times within approximately 18 months. During peak periods, historical cost reductions have exceeded 90% per year.
ARK’s analysts noted that this cost compression is fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape. The firms duking it out at the top of the AI market, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI, are no longer differentiated primarily by capability. They’re increasingly competing on performance-per-dollar.
