---
title: The Falling Cost of Intelligence
date: 2026-08-01T22:03:50+08:00
categories:
    - llms
description: This post highlights the dramatic fall in LLM intelligence costs. College-junior level intelligence dropped 500x in 1.5 years. Tenured-professor level intelligence is now $2/MTok, making advanced AI increasingly accessible and affordable.
tags: [llms, llm-pricing, ai, gemini, gemini-flash, llm-comparison]
---

It's amazing to watch the cost of intelligence falling.

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  <iframe src="https://sanand0.github.io/llmpricing/intelligence.html" title="LLM Intelligence Cost Drops" loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="display: block; width: 100%; height: 820px; height: min(56rem, 92svh); border: 0; background: #f5f1e6;"></iframe>
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In Nov 2023, we had college-junior level intelligence for $10 per million tokens, i.e. it would take them $10 to read and process something as large as all seven Harry Potter books.

By Apr 2025, Gemma 2 could do that at 2 cents. 500 times cheaper in a year and a half.

In Sep 2024, O1 brought in a college-grad level intelligence for $15 / MTok. That's 5 cents today with GLM 4.7 Flash.

In Jan 2026, Gemini 3 Pro brought us tenured-professor level intelligence for $2 / MTok. Let's give it a few months...

[![](https://files.s-anand.net/images/2026-08-01-the-falling-cost-of-intelligence.avif)](https://sanand0.github.io/llmpricing/intelligence.html)