Imagine if the price of oil dropped 300-fold in a single year. The global economy would turn upside down.
In the economy of intelligence, that is exactly what just happened.
I’ve been going through recent data from the ARC Prize Foundation leaderboard, the gold standard for testing AGI reasoning.
The numbers are difficult to believe, but Sam Altman has confirmed them.
A year ago, hitting a 75% score with a model like o3-preview cost about $200 because it had to brute force millions of tokens.
Today, the new OpenAI GPT-5.1 architectures do it for $0.67.
A 300x price drop in 12 months. We moved from brute force to insight in one product cycle.
Look closely at the scatter plot below. You can see the same gravitational pull from xAI’s Grok, Anthropic’s Claude, Google DeepMind’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.
They are all forcing the price of reasoning toward zero.
When a resource costs $200 you ration it. You hire one consultant. When it costs $0.67 you waste it. You spin up a swarm of a thousand agents.
We are moving from the Consultant Era to the Swarm Era. The only scarcity left is the ability to ask the right question.
