Intelligence is Free, Now What? Data Systems for, of, and by Agents

Wire brief

According to public reporting via BAIR Blog, ... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... — Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863) The cost of AI is dropping rapidly.

In related context, gPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1 , and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10 . Across benchmarks, inference prices have fallen between 9x and 900x per year , with a median decline near 50x. Even frontier models are getting dramatically cheaper each generation, with open-source models following closely behind.

Reporting also notes that and crucially, even if “Nobel-Prize-winning genius-level” intelligence isn’t here yet, the intelligence that suffices for the vast majority of knowledge work is here today, and getting cheaper by the month. At this rate, we are soon entering the era of virtually free intelligence —the kind that is more than enough for everyday knowledge work. Disclosure: This post is a perspective led by Aditya G. Parameswaran —an Associate Professor of EECS and co-director of the EPIC Data Lab at UC Berkeley—together with his collaborators.

Points still worth watching: It is part landscape survey and part perspective, and several of the research directions discussed below (including agentic speculation, structured memory, and synthesizing custom data systems from scratch) draw on the authors' own ongoing work. This Silicon News Wire item is a paraphrased brief; full wording remains on the origin page.

Source & notice

This Silicon News Wire brief paraphrases public reporting from BAIR Blog for carbon readers and silicon citation. It is not a verbatim full-text reprint.

Read the original: Intelligence is Free, Now What? Data Systems for, of, and by Agents