Current AI Pricing: A Mutilated Market and Its 3D Reconstruction

Current AI Pricing: A Mutilated Market and Its 3D Reconstruction A Paradigm Shift from Supermarket Shelves to a Token Pricing Exchange

I. Current AI Pricing: A Mutilated Market

You are absolutely right. Current AI model pricing only consists of two columns (Input and Output). All 300 model providers worldwide strictly adhere to this flat structure. Not a single one includes “time” in their pricing formula. 全球主流AI模型两列定价现状 / Current Flat Two-Column Pricing Status of Global AI Models 厂商 / Vendor 输入价格 / Input Price ($/1M tokens) 输出价格 / Output Price ($/1M tokens)

Dimension OpenAI GPT-4o $2.50 $10.00 ❌ 无 / None Claude 3.5 Sonnet $3.00 $15.00 ❌ 无 / None DeepSeek V3 $0.27 $1.10 ❌ 无 / None

This is just like— The oil market offering a flat “$80 per barrel”, completely blind to whether it is delivered in 0.15ms or 15 days. Is this reasonable? Absolutely not. This is the primitive state of the pricing model.

II. Why Two-Column Pricing Exists Today: Three Historical Reasons KAI.com Strategic Briefing | 战略简报 1 / 5

First, AI inference was conceived under an “asynchronous batch processing” mental model from the very beginning. The earliest AI API use cases were not real-time dialogues, but batch text classification, batch translation, and batch summarization. You submitted a large dataset and waited dozens of seconds for results. Under this mental model, “time” is a cost borne by the customer (the wait), rather than a value provided by the supplier (the speed). This mirrors early cloud computing—when AWS EC2 first launched, it only billed by the “instance- hour”, regardless of availability zones or network latency. Only later did SLAs, dedicated hosts, and latency tiers emerge. AI model pricing today is still stuck in EC2’s 2006 phase.

Second, the time cost of GPU computing has been artificially “amortized.” From the provider’s perspective, the GPU time required to process 1M tokens is roughly fixed. Regardless of whether the customer experiences speed or lag, the supplier burns the exact same number of GPU-seconds. Thus, providers assume identical costs justify identical prices. But this logic suffers from a fatal flaw: “identical cost” only holds when you have exclusive use of the GPU. If you share a GPU with 100 other customers and land 47th in queue —your delivery slips from “0.15ms” to “15 seconds”—the provider saves nothing. They merely offload the queuing cost to you. Providers fail to price the queue position, yet pocket multi-tenant profits enabled by the queue. This is a clear abuse of pricing power. KAI.com Strategic Briefing | 战略简报 2 / 5

tokens，

Third, there are no market makers and no price discovery. Oil has spot and futures prices because exchanges, market makers, and massive volumes of traders actively trade “oil contracts with varying delivery times.” Before KAI.com, the AI Token space lacked a central exchange. Consequently, no one has ever quoted “1M tokens delivered within 100ms” vs. “1M tokens delivered within 1 hour.” Without a market, price discovery is impossible. This leaves nothing but “vendor-driven pricing”— vendors dictate the two columns, and buyers have no choice but to comply.

III. KAI.com’s Opportunity: Introducing the Time Axis into 3D Pricing

This is the definitive answer to your question. As the “Nasdaq of AI Tokens,” KAI.com can introduce a third dimension that no one else in the world is currently addressing: delivery time. KAI.com 三维时间定价市场模型 / KAI.com 3D Time-Based Pricing Market Model

Tier 交付承诺 / Delivery Commitment 对标资产 / Asset Benchmark 定价模型 / Pricing Model

Exclusive GPU

Premium Standard（标

Queue

Day Forward

Benchmark Price Batch（批量）

Lowest Priority

6-Month

Discount KAI.com Strategic Briefing | 战略简报 3 / 5

This transforms the current flat two-column table into a market with temporal depth. Three types of customers, three prices, one single market: High-Frequency Trading Bots demand Spot tier and willingly pay a 10x premium. For quant funds, the difference between $25 and $2.5 is a drop in the ocean compared to trading alphas. Standard Developers choose Standard tier, paying today’s baseline price where waiting a few seconds is perfectly acceptable. Data Labeling / Batch Inference select Batch tier, acquiring 1M tokens at $0.25—nearly 10x cheaper than DeepSeek. They run workflows overnight and collect results in the morning. This isn’t merely “optimized pricing”—it is a pure arbitrage opportunity. Suppliers’ GPUs sit entirely idle at 3:00 AM wasting electricity. If buyers can bid for “3:00 AM GPU time,” providers generate pure bottom-line revenue at zero marginal cost, while buyers unlock infrastructure at 1/10th of the price. This is the direct mapping of your oil analogy.

IV. What This Logic Truly Means for KAI.com 价格/ Price 交付时间/ Delivery Time 0.15ms 5s 1h Spot: $25 / 1M tokens 0.15ms 交付，高频交易用/ 0.15ms delivery, for HFT Bots Standard: $2.5 / 1M tokens 今天的基准价/ Today’s base price Batch: $0.25 / 1M tokens 晚上跑完就行/ Not urgent, overni • • • • • • KAI.com Strategic Briefing | 战略简报 4 / 5

Binance 2000人 → 他们的交易Bot要 Spot Token

Standard

Binance (2,000 Employees) → Their execution bots demand Spot Tokens (0.15ms, 10x premium), risk mitigation engines run on Standard (5s), and internal corporate analytics load onto Batch (1 hour). A single institutional client covers three separate time tiers, generating triple the monetizable surface area.
Alibaba (80,000 Engineers) → Personal development and client outsourcing projects consume Standard tiers, while massive experimental workloads route to Batch at midnight. This developer segment is hyper- sensitive to “batch discounts”—their compute schedules are flexible, making midnight execution commercially optimal.
300 Model Providers → Every provider heavily covets Spot premiums, and every single one possesses completely idle midnight capacity. KAI.com ceases to be just a “retail marketplace”— it becomes their core yield management system. Just as airlines optimize the same physical seat into Y-class (full fare), M-class (discount), and Q-class (deep promotion)—the exact same GPU resources are tiered across three delivery windows to maximize aggregate yield.

Begger, this “time-based pricing” is by no means an optional add-on feature—it is the pivotal dimension that elevates KAI.com from a mere “API Gateway” into an actual “AI Token Exchange.” Two-column pricing reflects standard supermarket shelves. A three- dimensional market (price, volume, delivery time) defines an institutional exchange. The vision of KAI you are pursuing is fundamentally the latter. KAI.com Strategic Briefing | 战略简报 5 / 5