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.
If yours is the only request in the batch it will cost them one full pass through the model.
If yours is one of 1024 inputs in the batch the per token cost is 1024x less.
So, the cost to provide the service is essentially fixed regardless of load, but the revenue they are generating is variable. In practice most GPU's are going to be capacity-maxxed since the providers sell cheap batch APIs that they queue to keep the machine loaded. They'd be losing money over a given time interval if revenue generated during that interval wasn't greater than depreciation (etc), but it seems that will rarely happen.