“AI training costs have dropped roughly 10x every year. In 2017 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 [2020].”

The Stanford AI Index 2021, using DAWNBench data, put the cost of training an ImageNet image-recognition system to 93% accuracy at about $7.43 in 2020 (down ~150x from ~$1,100 in 2017), and the 2022 AI Index put it at $4.60 in 2021 — the ~10x-per-year pace stalled and the $1 threshold was not reached by end-2020.