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The Biggest Con of the 21st Century: Tokens How AI Companies Are Charging You More Without You Even Realizing It

You pay for what you use. That's the deal. Except it's not.

When you use an AI model — GPT-4, Claude, Gemini — you do not pay per word. You pay per token. And that tiny technical detail is quietly costing you, depending on which company you choose, up to 60% more for the exact same request.

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Wait until you hear that most models tend to perform worse for non-English languages.

Do you know if that's true of non-English models?

As I said elsewhere, Deepseek injects Chinese characters into responses. Anecdotally, that seems to happen when the context gets longer. That suggests that they're primarily trained in Chinese and I would expect them to use fewer tokens for Chinese than English.

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