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Equation 4 · Part 1 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

Symbol N_tok

Ntok(H,W)=⌈HP⌉×⌈WP⌉N_{\mathrm{tok}}(H,W) = \left\lceil \frac{H}{P} \right\rceil \times \left\lceil \frac{W}{P} \right\rceil
NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}}

What this part means

NtN_tok is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

NtN_tok is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

The passage around this formula

…formula covers all three counting schemes if the tile or patch edge length is left as a free constant P , specific to the vendor: Ntok(H,W)=⌈HP⌉×⌈WP⌉N_{\mathrm{tok}}(H,W) = \left\lceil \frac{H}{P} \right\rceil \times \left\lceil \frac{W}{P} \right\rceil. with a request’s image cost simply costimage\mathrm{cost}_{\mathrm{image}} = Ntok(H,W)N_{\mathrm{tok}}(H,W) ⋅\cdot ptokp_{\mathrm{tok}} at the model’s own per-token price ptokp_{\mathrm{tok}} . The constant differs — 28 pixels for Claude, 32 for GPT-5.4, roughly 768 divided into geometry-dependent tiles for Gemini — but the shape does not: token count, and therefore cost, scales with the…

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A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the article section

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