SenseTime ставит на «экономику задач»: цены на AI-токены неизбежно упадут

What SenseTime predicts

Chinese AI company SenseTime has stated that the commercialization of artificial intelligence is shifting from a "token economy" to a "task economy": as token prices fall in the coming years, the industry's money will shift from selling compute to charging for results. This was reported by SenseTime CEO Xu Li in an interview with the South China Morning Post in July 2026.

What SenseTime predicts

SenseTime believes that the current model, where customers pay for tokens — units of text processing in language models — is running its course. Once base models and computing power become commodity infrastructure, the company believes real commercial value will shift toward which specific tasks AI solves for a business, rather than how many tokens it consumes doing so.

SenseTime's position is a bet by one of China's leading AI companies on how the market will be structured in a few years. Key points from Xu Li's interview:

• SenseTime is one of China's largest AI companies
• Forecast: token prices will "inevitably" fall in the coming years
• Analogy: the drop in telecom data prices about 20 years ago
• Model shift: from a "token economy" to a "task economy"
• Condition for the shift: models and compute becoming basic infrastructure

Why token prices will fall

Token prices will fall because compute and model access are turning into a mass-market commodity — just as happened with mobile internet. Xu Li directly compares today's AI market to the telecom industry of twenty years ago, when gigabytes of traffic went from a premium resource to something cheap and ubiquitous.

"Token pricing will inevitably fall — much the same way data costs in telecom fell two decades ago," —

Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

For developers, this means that competing on low token price alone is no longer a sustainable strategy: if the cost of the "raw material" trends toward zero, it becomes impossible to make money on that raw material itself.

What the "task economy" is

The "task economy" is a model in which the customer pays not for the volume of tokens consumed, but for a specific piece of completed work: a processed document, a closed request, an operation carried through to completion. Per SenseTime's logic, once models and compute become basic infrastructure, it is the ability to carry a task through to a result — not to generate tokens — that will determine who makes money from AI.

This shift also changes how products are built: value is created by agentic systems and vertical solutions that take on an entire business process, rather than simply returning an answer to a query. This echoes the industry's broader move toward AI agents capable of carrying out multi-step tasks.

What this means

SenseTime's thesis fits a broader trend: as models get cheaper, the center of profit in the AI industry is shifting from selling "fuel" — tokens and compute — to selling results. The winners will be those who learn to package AI into completed tasks rather than reselling API access.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why will AI token prices fall?

According to SenseTime CEO Xu Li, the decline is inevitable because models and computing power are turning into mass-market infrastructure. He compares this to the drop in telecom data costs about 20 years ago.

What does SenseTime call the "task economy"?

It is a monetization model in which the customer pays for a completed AI task rather than for the amount of tokens consumed. SenseTime expects this shift as base models become standard market infrastructure.