ARC-AGI: The Efficiency Story the Leaderboards Don't Show

The ARC-AGI benchmark tests AI's genuine reasoning ability, not just memorization or pattern matching. The leaderboard shows a diagonal line, suggesting that progress in AI is expensive and permanent. However, upon closer inspection, it appears that the cost of achieving high scores has decreased over time, indicating a shift in the efficiency frontier. The true story behind the leaderboard is that AI models are improving in both performance and cost-efficiency, with some methods achieving impressive improvements without significant increases in cost.