Price per 1M tokens is meaningless
Summary
The article argues that pricing AI by price per 1M tokens is a misleading metric due to tokenizer variance and token efficiency. It analyzes how token counts don’t reliably reflect cost per task and compares various models to illustrate how cost per task can diverge from per-token costs. It advocates evaluating AI cost using cost per task rather than token-based metrics, especially for budgeting and model selection.