138 AI Cost Efficiency Gains = Happening Faster vs. Prior Technologies Note: Price change in consumer goods and services in the United States is measured as the percentage change since 1997. Data is based on the consumer price index (CPI) for national average urban consumer prices. Per OpenAI, 100 AI ‘tokens’ generates approximately 75 words in a large language model response; data shown indexes to this number of tokens. ‘Year 0’ is not necessarily the year that the technology was introduced, but rather the first year of available data. Source: Electricity Costs – Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry, Richard Hirsh (1989); Computer Memory Storage Costs – John C. McCallum, with data aggregated from 72 primary sources and historical company sales documents; OpenAI, Wikimedia Commons Relative Cost of Key Technologies by Year Since Launch, per OpenAI, John McCallum, & Richard Hirsh 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 0 20 40 60 80 Electric Power Computer Memory ChatGPT: 75-Word Response % of Original Price By Year (Indexed to Year 0) AI Model Compute Costs High / Rising + Inference Costs Per Token Falling = Performance Converging + Developer Usage Rising