The normalisation ladder · rung 4

US$ per task — declined

What a unit of completed work costs. The denomination every buyer actually wants — and the one the market has not defined.

Declined — published with the reasons · notice 2026-08-20 §3

1 · US$ per MW→2 · US$ per GPU-hour→3 · US$ per million tokens→4 · US$ per task

Ⅰ · The declination

why no $/task figure prints · decision of record 2026-08-20

The position

The Grid publishes no price per task, and will not until the market defines the unit. The per-task cost of compute is the number every buyer actually wants — which is exactly why publishing a defensible-looking wrong one would be the most damaging thing this surface could do. The rung is declined for three stated reasons.

1. Task definitions are not standardised.

There is no governed, market-accepted definition of “a task” to price. A price for an undefined deliverable is not a price.

2. Task benchmarks are gameable.

Where task suites exist, they are optimisation targets; a $/task print built on them would inherit their drift without inheriting any governance.

3. A $/task print would be false precision.

Tokens-per-task varies on the order of 2× between models on the same work; any single $/task number silently embeds a model choice and presents it as a property of the market.

Ⅱ · What would reopen the rung

a dated condition, not a mood

A standardised, independently governed task definition — one with the governance shape of an audited benchmark: submission, peer validation, publication under rules — would make the unit priceable. If the market produces that unit, The Grid reopens the rung by methodology change notice, with a full specification, before any figure prints. Until then, the declination stands as published methodology, dated 2026-08-20.

What The Grid does instead — The nearest honest object is a fixed reference workload: hold the work constant by definition and price the routes to it. That exists — the Reference Workload Index prices two fixed workloads daily across the routes a buyer actually has, with its token-denominated limitation disclosed on every value. See /standards/instruments/rwi and /instruments §Ⅲ. A reference workload is not a task unit: it is a stated definition The Grid controls, priced as arithmetic — not a claim about what “a task” costs.

Rung 4 of the normalisation ladder, declined (notice 2026-08-20-normalisation-ladder, 2026-08-20 §3). The declination is methodology, not an omission: it is dated, citable, and reversible only by a further notice.