Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

The article examines whether AI agent capability improvements are being driven by exponential cost increases rather than genuine efficiency gains. Over seven years, model parameters grew 4,000x and token generation ~100,000x, yet costs may have grown exponentially despite efficiency improvements. It questions whether widely-cited time-horizon benchmarks mask the reality that cutting-edge AI systems are becoming less cost-competitive with human labor due to mounting computational expenses.