Records / Price observations

Recommended spend per RL task for frontier post-training (Mechanize analysis)

~$500 per RL task now, rising roughly fivefold to a few thousand dollars within a year

Dated 18 Aug 2025Source checked 15 Oct 2026Quote found on its page again 17 Oct 2026Basis: vendor

In the source's own words
“the average cost will be (500,000 tokens × $15 × 64) ÷ 1M = $480 per RL task per run. ... the total lifetime compute expense will be $2,400 for each RL task. ... this argument suggests it's inefficient for AI labs to spend significantly less than ~$500 per RL task.”
Figures it counts in
  • $2,837 per taskDatasets, tasks and environments, made to order, per task
  • 9.5xHow much more buyers pay than makers are paid for datasets, tasks and environments, per task
  • 36Prices per task behind every valuation of a task set
Recommended spend per RL task for frontier post-training (Mechanize analysis): ~$500 per… | AIData.Broker