The Cost of AI Training is Improving at 50x the Speed of Moore’s Law

For many use cases, the cost to run an AI inference system has collapsed to almost nil. After just five years of development, deep learning – the modern incarnation of AI – seems to have reached a tipping point in both cost and performance, paving the way for widespread adoption over the next decade.

During the past ten years, the computing resources devoted to AI training models have exploded. After doubling every two years from 1960 to 2010, AI compute complexity has soared 10x every year. Just as important, AI training costs have dropped roughly 10x every year. In 2017, for example, the cost to train an image recognition network like ResNet-50 on a public cloud was ~$1,000. In 2019, the cost dropped to ~$10. At the current rate of improvement, the cost should fall to $1 by the end of this year.