The price of machine intelligence has fallen about 10x a year, while enterprises' AI costs are growing exponentially.
$60 → $6 → $0.06
cost per million tokens, for the same performance (2021 → 2023 → 2024): ~1,000x cheaper in three years
$1.7bn → $37bn
enterprise AI spend, 2023 → 2025 (~22x)
The reading — and its limits
The curve is per-token for equivalent performance — the falling price of a fixed capability, not the cost of any one task. Unit price collapses; total spend explodes anyway as usage surges. (Spend estimates vary by scope across analysts; Menlo's ~$37bn generative-AI figure is not the same as broader all-AI estimates and shouldn't be added to them.)
Method Cost curve from a16z "LLMflation" + Epoch AI (reproducible, published code); enterprise spend from Menlo Ventures' 2025 report (named).
Computed 1 August 2026