Brett Harrison’s Architect bets auctions can make AI inference cheaper

Brett Harrison thinks AI inference should be priced like a trade, not a menu item. The CEO of Architect Financial Technologies is making the case for an auction-based marketplace for AI inference. His argument is that letting providers set prices based on their marginal costs could push the cost of running AI models down. Architect launched a platform built on that idea, called Liquid Inference, on or around October 7, 2026. How Liquid Inference works Inference is the part of AI most users actually touch. It is the moment a trained model takes your prompt and produces an answer, and every one of those answers costs compute. Liquid Inference turns that compute into something providers compete for. Inference providers bid in real time for model-serving jobs. Buyers then choose the offer that best fits their priorities. Those priorities are not limited to price. Buyers can weigh cost, latency, and how their data gets handled, so a team that cares about speed can choose differently from a team that cares about the bill. The economic logic rests on marginal cost. That is the cost of serving one more request. A provider with idle GPUs at 3 a.m. pays very little to take on another job, so...