← All parts of this equation

Equation 4 · Part 6 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

fraction

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
fraction

What this part means

Divide the expression above the line by the one below it.

Its job in the formula

The expression above the fraction bar is divided by the complete expression below it. The denominator must not be zero.

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 fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

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Sources cited in the article section

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