Sam Altman publishes “Three Observations” on the economics of AI
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published Feb 9, 2025 on blog.samaltman.com; announced on X the same day
- Observation 1: intelligence ≈ log(resources: training compute, data, inference compute)
- Observation 2: cost of a given level of AI falls ~10x every 12 months (e.g. ~150x per-token price drop from GPT-4 early 2023 to GPT-4o mid-2024)
- Observation 3: socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential
- Envisions that by 2035 anyone could marshal the intellectual capacity of everyone in 2025
What happened
Altman set out a compact economic model of AI progress that explains the lab’s huge infrastructure bets.
Why it matters
It became a frequently cited framing for AI cost curves and investment logic in 2025–2026.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Sam Altman: Three Observationsblog.samaltman.com, official
- Sam Altman on X: ‘Three Observations’x.com, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)