Qwen3.6 9B is as good as GPT-4o and runs on my M2 MacBook Air. Models are getting stronger and less costly at the same time, but these are somewhat separate branches of research. Frontier labs are spending more because they are still getting marginal returns and there is more capacity to spend than there was a year ago.

You are mixing cost and progress. It’s not because it’s more and more expensive that progress is slowing down by itself.

Cost for a specific level of performance decreases 10x per year, this has been a pretty consistent property for awhile now.