alt Hacker NewsPricing based on tokens always seemed a little weird to me.“Tokens” was and still is an engineering concept. The fundamental unit of transformer encoding and decoding.
But I have a sinking feeling that many AI developers think “tokens” got their name from the same idea as “virtual tokens in a casino” which is more related to product pricing and business.
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HarHarVeryFunny • today at 9:00 PM
Tokens do reflect the provider's cost though - each token output required them to execute the model once, normally incurring a fixed amount of compute per token.
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Tokens in a casino is pretty accurate if you think about it. You never really know what you'll get so it's tempting to "roll" over and over, thinking every roll puts you closer to a bellringer. It can even get addicting for some people.