The Price of Progress: Price Performance and the Future of AI

ArXi:2511.23455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Language models have seen enormous progress on advanced benchmarks in recent years, but much of this progress has only been possible by using costly models. Benchmarks may therefore present a warped picture of progress in practical capabilities *per dollar*. To remedy this, we use data from Artificial Analysis and Epoch AI to form the largest dataset of current and historical prices to run benchmarks to date.