# Introduction

## The Grid is a Spot Market for AI Inference

You pick a task type. Then you pick a quality tier. We route your request to a qualifying supplier at the lowest live price for that combination.

Task types describe the workload:

* **Text** for general-purpose chat and reasoning.
* **Code** for code generation, editing, and review.
* **Agent** for tool use, function calling, and multi-step workflows.

Quality tiers describe how strong the underlying model has to be:

* **Standard** for everyday tasks where speed and cost matter most.
* **Prime** for production workloads that need consistent, capable output.
* **Max** for the hardest tasks where you want frontier-class quality.

Each task type and tier maps to an **instrument**, a published spec like `text-prime` or `code-max`. Suppliers compete on every order. Any model that drifts below spec is removed from the eligible set, so you get the price of competition without giving up the quality bar.

{% hint style="info" %}
We're compatible with both OpenAI Chat Completions and Anthropic Messages formats. See the [API reference](/docs/api-reference/api-reference.md) for base URLs, auth headers, and request shape.
{% endhint %}

## What this means for you

* **Lower price for the quality you need.** Suppliers bid against each other on your order. Pricing tracks live supply and demand, not a published rate card.
* **One API, no SDK rewrite.** Keep your OpenAI or Anthropic client. Swap in an instrument string as the model name and ship.
* **No vendor lock-in.** You aren't tied to one model house. If a better-priced model qualifies, we route to it without you changing code.

## Where to go next

* [Quickstart](/docs/start-here/quickstart.md): make your first call in under five minutes.
* [Choose an instrument](/docs/start-here/choose-an-instrument.md): pick the task type and quality tier for your workload.
* [Current instruments](/docs/instrument-specifications/current-instruments.md): see the live specs and what each one is benchmarked against.
* [Benefits](/docs/benefits/benefits.md): what you gain by consuming inference at market prices.


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