OpenAI's o3 might cost $30,000 per task
The Arc Prize Foundation just revised its compute cost estimate for OpenAI's upcoming o3 model, finding that o3 high could cost roughly $30,000 to solve a single ARC-AGI problem—ten times its initial $3,000 guess. The spike reflects intense test-time compute: the model needed 1,024 attempts per task to hit peak accuracy, using 172 times more compute than o3 low. Why it matters: Frontier reasoning gains are real, but brute-forcing complex logic might be economically unfeasible for most early applications.