AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

The Price of Intelligence: A Quality-Adjusted Price Index for AI Services

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 30, 2026 · UTC

Posted prices for AI inference have fallen steadily since 2024, yet the measured speed of that fall depends almost entirely on the method of measurement. This paper constructs quality-adjusted price indices for the AI inference market from public data. The panel assembles 21,024 posted-price observations across 3,208 models and 86 providers and joins them to 4,605 benchmark scores through a latent quality index estimated from benchmark response patterns, so the quality ladder of the hedonic tradition is built here from evaluations in place of product characteristics. Measured by the matched-mo

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-21T07:31:56.984Z. This is not the publication date.