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Equation 10 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

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τframe\tau_{\mathrm{frame}}

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τframe\tau_{\mathrm{frame}}

Symbol tau_frame

taufu_frame is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

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subscript

subscript

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.

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where t is duration in seconds, f the sampling rate, and τframe\tau_{\mathrm{frame}} , τaudio\tau_{\mathrm{audio}} the per-frame and per-second-of-audio token costs Google publishes. A minute of default-resolution video comes to roughly 18,000 tokens — about 2.7 cents at Gemini 3.5 Flash’s input rate, or about 1.35 cents at Gemini 3.7 Flash’s [ 6 , 4 ] . That is understanding a minute of footage: having the model watch it once and answer questions about it.

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