Equation 5 · Part 6 · What Alignment Actually Costs
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
The unit economics matter because a dataset’s cost is close to linear in its size: . with n comparisons collected at a mean cost per comparison. The direct comparison published in the RLAIF paper puts numbers on both sides of a genuinely useful substitution. Lee and colleagues estimate that an AI-generated preference label produced with two inference passes of GPT-4 — used to correct for position bias, at an average of about 830 prompt tokens and 61 tokens of chain-of-thought rationale — costs about 0.06 US dollars per example, against about 0.67 US dollars per example for a human label purchased through a commercial annotation service pricing at roughly 0.11 US…
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 surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.