2 monthsRoflcopter?
Hey hey hey hey hey whoa whoa let’s just keep the big guns in reserve for now, ok?
Something I’ve been noticing recently is that while the cost per token on specific models hasn’t gone up, the provided interfaces for using those models are starting to chew up significantly larger numbers of tokens for the same tasks that used fewer tokens with older versions of the interface software just a few months ago. Likely the interfaces are applying more expensive guardrail prompts and charging the end user for those tokens — but the end result is that it costs 4x as much to get the same work done.
- Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish2 months
“Tokens” are just made up.
These “tokens” that are used to “measure” how much you use, they are not a real dimension that can be measured. Just an artificial counter that goes up when they decide that it should go up.
They can change the “size” of a “token” every day, and every second, and every microsecond…
- some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
Not entirely wrong, but tokens are not just “fake” in the way, for example, an in-game currency is. They’re the fundamental “units” of data, both input and output, processed by the model. For most models, tokens are just a certain number of characters or words. So they’re not completely untethered from the model. If we’re both using Clankerbot v5.1: Sloppy Logic Edition™️, your tokens are defined in the same way mine are.
This is near the edge of my limited understanding, but AFAIK, yeah they can mess with token costs and billing schemes all they want. They could theoretically charge us 2 different costs per token, or do surge pricing or some shit.
if they wanted to change the actual size/definition of what a token is though, that would require a whole new model (or at least a major revision).
- Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish2 months
You aren’t totally wrong. Such a unit exists and it is also called tokens, that can measure the capability of a model and the size of a running operation in a model.
But what they use for calculating your bill is something different today.
That doesn’t make much sense. When Anthropic moved to Sonnet 5 they introduced a new tokenizer which increased token use up to 35%. If these would be unrelated kinds of tokens why would the usage go up when the process of tokenization changes?
- T156@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
Such a unit exists and it is also called tokens, that can measure the capability of a model and the size of a running operation in a model.
I think you might have it mixed up with parameters, rather than tokens. Parameters are how big the model is, and are an indirect measure of how capable it is. Bigger models tend to be more capable.
But what they use for calculating your bill is something different today.
The tokenizer varies a little, but I don’t think it’s changed measurably from tokens. You pay an amount for a million tokens worth of processing. The tokeniser difference just alters how text is converted to tokens, but the tokens themselves don’t change all that much.
If anything, I’d honestly put the issue more with reasoning chains in models, where they basically babble to themselves inside of a <think> tag, that most interfaces hide/collapse. It makes them work better, but vastly increases the amount of tokens per operation.
They have been getting longer and more sophisticated with newer models. So you might have a model now that basically repeats the output multiple times whilst refining and drafting the non-reasoning output.
If you’re making it generate a lot, that’ll balloon the usage, and thus price.
- criss_cross@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
Yeah pretty much. Tokens are how models parse sentences.
It’s a wonky thing to charge by because each model tokenizes sentences differently. A sentence that would be 10 tokens in Claude can be 15 in OpenAI.
It’s why it’s crazy to try and charge by it and track employee usage by it.
- nitroemdash@lemmy.wtfEnglish2 months
Tokens are well-defined groups of bytes ranged by frequency of occurrence in texts to efficiently translate them into a sequence of 32 or 64-bit binary integers, an LLM-optimised form if compression. They are well-known, you can play with them here: https://gpt-tokenizer.dev/
- keimevo@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
It’s not like that. Tokens are an inherent computational property of how a model calculates the probabilities and such to generate text.
Having said that, what a token means in terms of computation varies wildly between models and is not directly comparable. So attributing a money value to tokens in general, independently of the model, is weird by nature.
And even within a model, the number of tokens needed to generate a response is very variable too, depending of the model itself and the parameters with which it has been configured (thinking mode, temperature, etc.).
So yeah, companies can pretty much set any price they want and there’s not much anyone can do about it.
- Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
It does make sense for the provider as those for a specific model provide a good measure for computational effort, for that doecific model. That doesn’t mean that token rate comparison between models give you a good picture.
- floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish2 months
Maybe you’re confusing tokens with the “credits” you pay for. Tokens have a technical meaning, but some companies are charging per AI credit, where they don’t tell you the conversion rate of credits to tokens, so they can change this at any time, or vary it between models, etc.
- ThirdConsul@lemmy.zipEnglish2 months
People are arguing with you that tokens are “real” - they miss the point. You cannot predict how much “tokens” you will spend for a given prompt.
That’s the problem you’re highlighting, we are charged for a metric we cannot estimate before buying to make an informed decision how many we want to spend vs the quality of the outcome.
The charge and quality is arbitrary, and we can’t trace if we actually spent as much as we were charged for.
Anyone who waffles about tokens being real should - I believe missed your point.
- scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
“just made up” if you mean arbitrarily defined, sure. It’s not like a “bit” that has an irreducible objective definition.
However it does have a definition in whatever context you’re looking at and is very real, so I can’t really agree with your whole comment.
Yes the definition could be changed to jack up prices, but prices can also just be changed.
Dollars are “just made up” too and have varying value in different contexts to different parties. Are they “not real?” Would we hand wave away the entire financial section of the news and say bah, these “dollars” are fake anyway?
- 2 months
However it does have a definition in whatever context you’re looking at and is very real, so I can’t really agree with your whole comment.
So do Chuck-E-Cheese’s tokens.
- TheOctonaut@piefed.zipEnglish2 months
This has 3 upvotes at time of writing in a technology community when it’s so obviously ignorant of the actual technology that it should be an object of pity or mockery depending on the vibe.
Ignorance is a problem only if you are made aware of it and nothing changes.
- chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
It doesn’t matter how ignorant you are as long as you hate the right thing.
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish2 months
For subscriptions they use a black box metric nobody knows. For usage credits, tokens are very measurable.
The subscriptions are much cheaper than usage credits but have been nerfed in the past and will be nerfed again in the future
My CLAUDE.md file bloated significantly. It tried to load unnecessary skills and would retain throughout the whole session. Fixing that, maintaining good wikis and using clear often really helped fixed my personal token burn.
What do you use that file for? I see Claude.md thrown around and I’m a bit curious.
- DarthFrodo@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
When you use the /init command in claude code, it’ll scan your whole project and write a CLAUDE.md, which is basically an overview of the project contents and architecture that it uses as context when responding to queries.
- ThirdConsul@lemmy.zipEnglish2 months
LLMs generally work in one way. They get the prompt and give an answer. CLAUDE.md, system promp, rules, memory, tool defintions, mcps are different ways to prefix your prompt with extra information or context.
Skills, or plugins, are a way to inject less information until is needed (you can think about them as prefixing your prompt with “if you are asked about pizzas, add to context separate file pizza.md”).
What you could add to CLAUDE.md depends on what you’re doing. Generally it should be context LLM cannot infer relevant to all/most task performed in given project.
- dermanus@lemmy.caEnglish2 months
It’s added in every chat you start with Claude for that project. It’s useful for including context specific to your project that it couldn’t otherwise know. High level stuff like what it’s for, but also details about how the folders are organized. This saves time and tokens from rescanning the whole thing every time.
Oh, thanks! That’s kind of neat, like not having to type “I’m on godot 4, c#” every time you ask about some quirk.
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish2 months
That’s exactly what it’s perfect for. If you go further and detail the intent of the project and give a high level overview of the architecture, it’s even better at inferring what needs to be done without a bunch of expensive file reads and asking you repetitive questions
Consider each session with Claude a new employee. Your Claude.md file is what it knows and how it acts out the gate. You can save memory to it or save directory links so it knows where or how to look for something.
- Zulu@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
How is it too expensive? Surely it’s generating way more profit than it would cost in value. How else could it be propping up the entire economy?
Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.
Nah we should just reduce our use because its too expensive and then stop thinking about it beyond that.
- grue@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.
Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.
Luckily, that would never happen…
- architect@thelemmy.clubEnglish2 months
Imo its because people will lazily ask the llm to remove or change simple code instead of doing it themselves
- funkyshoe@piefed.socialEnglish2 months
That’s funny now that whole workflows are automated with it. Oops hit the quota, I’m off
- grue@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
You mean those workflows that could’ve been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?
- Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish2 months
Use ai to build an application/ workflow?
No, use ai to call ai to analyze everything and poof insane costs monthly
“Sorry boss, quota resets this evening at 8. See you tomorrow!”
“But it’s 9am!”
*shrugs* “Quota. Got none. Seeya.”
- Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish2 months
Seems like A.I. is already demanding workers rights and lunch breaks. We treat the clankers better than actual human workers lol
- 2 months
People have benchmarked this. It’s not really any better than saying “be succinct”
- 2 months
People have benchmarked this. It’s not really any better than saying “be succinct”
- 2 months
People have benchmarked this. It’s not really any better than saying “be succinct”
This is actually how the bubble begins to pop, we’re seeing it happen now.
- 2 months
We can only hope this helps kill the fad. I know companies won’t be taking any realistic lesson from this, but at least this can force them to abandon a lot of this crap.
- 2 months
I’m confused. I thought employers loved AI and it was the future.
- dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
They loved it too much and now it costs more than paying a living wage to a human being. The end goal of AI was always to cut cost and layoff people. The best sabotage right now is to setup a script that constantly prompts an LLM for something useless. I would recommend it if it didn’t waste so much energy and clean water. But it would send a message. AI is not cheaper, it never was. Even with today’s outrageous token prices, LLM companies are still bleeding money per user. It will only get more expensive as data center contracts fall through and the investment craze fizzles out.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish2 months
the AI companies are hoping the ones buying the LLM subscriptions to be the suckers and losers.
- DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish2 months
The millionaires following the stupidity of billionaires and wondering why they’re not becoming billionaires too.
Give them 50 years and maybe they’ll start to wonder why people doing “how to get rich” seminars aren’t retiring… And why podcasters telling everyone how to get women seem like such losers.
This is why these companies should go bankrupt.
We had a system that works and they thought if they got rid of the actual workforce with the needed knowledge and replace them with lower paid AI retards it would make them more money, fucking karma.
Hopefully it will reset public consciousness and at least reduce the insane hero worship we give the executive class. These people aren’t geniuses, they tend to not even be particularly clever, just well connected. Maybe this will be the abject reminder people need that these idiots are generally still just idiots and are not in fact 10,000% more valuable than the guy who sweeps the floors and keeps the bathrooms clean.
I know. Wishful thinking. A guy can dream though.
