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Equation 6 · Part 1 · What Multimodal AI Actually Costs, Modality by Modality

Symbol p_tok

ptokp_{\mathrm{tok}}
ptokp_{\mathrm{tok}}

What this part means

ptp_tok is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

Its job in the formula

ptp_tok is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

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 area of the image, not its…

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Sources cited in the article section

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