Equation 4 · Where Multimodal Frontier Models Actually Differ, Beyond the Marketing
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Symbol tau_audio
taudio is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
subscript
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What the article says around this equation
where, at default resolution, the sampling rate f is one frame per second, each frame costs 258 tokens, and the audio track costs 32 tokens per second — giving 290 tokens per second, close to the approximately 300 tokens per second Google documents directly for default-resolution video [ 5 ] . The formula is unremarkable arithmetic, but what it exposes is the real assumption underneath the “native” claim: a single request is billed, and therefore presumably processed, as one combined audio-visual stream, not as a picture track with a separately bolted-on transcript.
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