That's true, but it makes it difficult to compare pricing when it's based on tokens. Maybe we need a benchmark for price per a specific input, like enwiki8.

Yes, almost all work people share which seeks to measure the capabilities and differences of models needs to get more precise. We are clamoring to say something meaningful about these things.

But even that isn't the whole story because the models can produce wildly amount of thinking output as well as regular output for a similar query. Sometimes you can take a cheap model and have it think a ton or an expensive model that thinks little and get similar results. But the number of tokens generated will be wildly different.

A better metric is price per byte. Most thinking traces, prompts, skills are in plain English, which is roughly 1 byte per character, assuming UTF-8 encoding (even code should not be much more either). As an aside, it is common to use bits-per-byte as a loss metric instead of the per token calculation, precisely because of the effect of different tokenizers.

It is kind of a shame we ended up comparing token pricing across models and providers when it doesn’t really make sense. Not sure what would be better though.