LMaaS: Exploring Pricing Strategy of Large Model as a Service for
  Communication
Panlong Wu Qi Liu Yanjie Dong Fangxin Wang
The next generation of communication is envisioned to be intelligent
communication, that can replace traditional symbolic communication, where
highly condensed semantic information considering both source and channel will
be extracted and transmitted with high efficiency. The recent popular large
models such as GPT4 and the boosting learning techniques lay a solid foundation
for the intelligent communication, and prompt the practical deployment of it in
the near future. Given the characteristics of "training once and widely use" of
those multimodal large language models, we argue that a pay-as-you-go service
mode will be suitable in this context, referred to as Large Model as a Service
(LMaaS). However, the trading and pricing problem is quite complex with
heterogeneous and dynamic customer environments, making the pricing
optimization problem challenging in seeking on-hand solutions. In this paper,
we aim to fill this gap and formulate the LMaaS market trading as a Stackelberg
game with two steps. In the first step, we optimize the seller's pricing
decision and propose an Iterative Model Pricing (IMP) algorithm that optimizes
the prices of large models iteratively by reasoning customers' future rental
decisions, which is able to achieve a near-optimal pricing solution. In the
second step, we optimize customers' selection decisions by designing a robust
selecting and renting (RSR) algorithm, which is guaranteed to be optimal with
rigorous theoretical proof. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and
robustness of our algorithms.