Development

Hard reasoning gets a thousand times cheaper in sixteen months

development2026-03-12

Claim

Sam Altman revealed that solving a hard reasoning problem has become a thousand times cheaper in the sixteen months since o1, comparing it to GPT-5.4.

Reported metric: 1000x / 16 months

Reporting date: 2026-03-12 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to March 12, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

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Reported in

Welcome to March 12, 2026

Actor

Evidence for

The price of reasoning is deflating

Supersedes

The same ARC score costs 400x less than it did fourteen months ago

Referenced by

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Citation formatCitation text

Hard reasoning gets a thousand times cheaper in sixteen months
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: 2026-03-12
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/developments/2026-03-12-reasoning-1000x-cheaper-in-16-months
Claim: Sam Altman revealed that solving a hard reasoning problem has become a thousand times cheaper in the sixteen months since o1, comparing it to GPT-5.4.
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to March 12, 2026 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-march-12-2026
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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