Equation 11 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
the per-frame and per-second-of-audio token costs Google publishes. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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Symbol tau_audio
the per-frame and per-second-of-audio token costs Google publishes.
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.
How to interpret it
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What the article says around this equation
where t is duration in seconds, f the sampling rate, and , 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.
Sources cited in the article section
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