Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, says the cost of solving complex reasoning problems with AI has dropped roughly 1000x in just 16 months. He compared the early o1 model with the newer 5.4 generation, showing how quickly the economics of AI computation are improving. Altman argues this speed comes partly from how early the field still is. Researchers are rapidly discovering better training methods, architectures, and inference techniques, replacing what he described as earlier “dumb ways” of doing thin