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Equation 5 · Part 1 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

Symbol N_tok

costimage=Ntok(H,W)⋅ptok\mathrm{cost}_{\mathrm{image}} = N_{\mathrm{tok}}(H,W) \cdot p_{\mathrm{tok}}
NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}}

What this part means

NtN_tok is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

NtN_tok is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

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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Learn the underlying idea

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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