louisyzhu/price-of-intelligence

The Price of Intelligence

A quality-adjusted price panel for AI inference services (API only), built from public data at zero cost, with the capability table and crosswalk it is joined to, and the validity audit of the benchmarks underneath it.

What is here

File	Rows	What it is
data/panel/panel.parquet	21,791	Posted prices, one row per model x reasoning effort x provider x month x source
data/panel/benchmark_scores.parquet	5,067	Capability table, 4,605 scored cells on one bounded scale
data/panel/model_crosswalk.csv	1,350	Panel-to-Epoch namespace join, method recorded per row
data/panel/codebook.md		Column-by-column codebook

The headline panel is 21,024 observed price observations from 2024-02 to 2026-08, across 3,208 priced models, 86 providers and 31 months. The crosswalk reaches 500 of 782 scored models.

How to read it honestly

• Prices are posted list prices, on one named channel per provider. Transaction prices sit below list, so the true decline is faster than the panel shows.
• Gaps are gaps. A month with no observation carries price_flag = gap and a gap_reason. Nothing is interpolated or carried forward.
• Every observation carries source_url and archive_timestamp, and the provenance ledgers in the Zenodo deposit give one line per observation.
• Effort variants share a posted price and carry their own capability and tokens per task. One posted price is one observation: weight rows 1/k across the k effort variants of an endpoint and cluster on the endpoint.
• The capability measure is estimated, not observed. Use the plausible values, not a point estimate, if you want honest intervals.

Provenance and reproduction

The paper this dataset supports is a preprint, arXiv:2608.29843.

Version 1.0.1 regenerates the full analysis chain from the bundle alone; archived at 10.5281/zenodo.22693256.

The analysis was pre-registered before estimation began: https://osf.io/5uqj2/, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/5UQJ2. Every deviation from it is logged in the decision log shipped with the deposit.

The git repository omits the 29 provenance ledgers (85 MB); data/raw/MANIFEST.sha256 stands in for them there. The ledgers ship with the Zenodo deposit, and reproduction runs from that bundle, not from a bare clone. Verify with shasum -a 256 -c MANIFEST.sha256.

Licence

Data CC-BY-4.0, code MIT. See LICENSE-DATA.txt and LICENSE-CODE.txt. Attribution string in LICENSE-DATA.txt.

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  "citation": "Zhu, Louis Yiven (2026). The Price of Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22177190",
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