The cache is stored on Antropics servers, since its a save state of the LLM's weights at the time of processing. its several gigs in size. Every SINGLE TIME you send a message and its a cache miss you have to reprocess the entire message again eating up tons of tokens in the process

clarification though: the cache that's important to the GPU/NPU is loaded directly in the memory of the cards; it's not saved anywhere else. They could technically create cold storage of the tokens (vectors) and load that, but given how ephemeral all these viber coders are, it's unlikely there's any value in saving those vectors to load in.

So then it comes to what you're talking about, which is processing the entire text chain which is a different kind of cache, and generating the equivelent tokens are what's being costed.

But once you realize the efficiency of the product in extended sessions is cached in the immediate GPU hardware, then it's obvious that the oversold product can't just idle the GPU when sessions idle.