Equation 8 · Part 2 · Comparing Frontier Model Pricing Without Comparing Apples to Oranges
subscript
subscript
What this part means
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
Its job in the formula
A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.
Full expression→subscript→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Collecting every distinction above into one expression makes explicit what a bare price comparison assumes without saying so. For vendor i , let and be the published input and output rates; let be a tokenizer expansion factor, the number of tokens vendor i ’s own tokenizer needs to encode one fixed reference passage, normalised so = 1 for whichever vendor is used as the baseline; let be the fraction of input served from cache and the cache-read multiplier; and let be the ratio of total output tokens generated, visible answer plus hidden reasoning, to the visible answer alone. A workload’s realised cost per completed task…
Learn the underlying idea
A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.
Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →
Sources cited in the article section
- [8] Comparison of AI Models across Intelligence, Performance, and Price ↗
- [7] LLM Inference Price Trends ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.