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Equation 4 · Part 3 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

Symbol W

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
WW

What this part means

W occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.

Its job in the formula

W occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.

The passage around this formula

A single 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 area of the image, not its linear size. Doubling both width and height quadruples the token bill under every one of these three schemes. That is the single fact behind…

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Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the article section

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