# Cost per Attempt **Entity class:** AI-economics metric **Domain:** Artificial intelligence / Inference economics **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Cost per attempt measures the computational and monetary expense of giving a model or agent one opportunity to solve a task. ## Mechanism and significance For verifiable problems, falling cost per attempt can make massive parallel search economical even when individual attempts remain unreliable. ## Relationships - **Research dossier:** [[research/ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots|ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots]] - **Ontology route:** [[ASI and RSI Timeline Ontology#Model Architecture and Compute Economics|Model Architecture and Compute Economics]] - **Primary fields:** [[Machine Intelligence]] · [[AI Infrastructure]] · [[Compute Race]] - **Adjacent concepts:** [[Compute Ownership]] · [[Hyperscale Resource Allocation]] · [[Cost per Token]] · [[Orchestration Economics]] ## Sources and provenance - [[research/ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots|ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots]] — immediate source for this node's role in the broadcast research map. ## Evidence boundary The research dossier establishes why this entity or concept belongs in the Moonshots ontology. Time-sensitive organizational, product, policy, and performance claims should be checked against the linked primary source or a current authoritative source before reuse as settled fact.