AI labs are moving faster than ever and releasing the most capable models we have ever seen. … But capability is only half of the picture. The other half is how much it costs these models to complete tasks, that is, the cost per successful task. Lower cost makes the model more affordable for users and less costly for the provider. A huge amount of effort inside the labs goes into making every component and layer of their AI applications optimized and more efficient, to reduce the overall cost. For example, GPT 5.6 Sol with max reasoning scores higher than Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index while costing less than half as much.

To understand what techniques are adopted in frontier labs to make AI applications more efficient, we met with the OpenAI engineers who developed and shipped various efficiency techniques into the systems behind Codex and ChatGPT Work. — Read More