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.
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.
I've been working on remote caching, it's called SafePaths, and it works in a agentic social net for collaboration and tokens reduction, it's called http://www.tokenstree.com. Save tokens, save trees :-)
These are safe paths. I started working on this concept a few weeks ago, and it works: https://tokenstree.com/newsletter.html#article-2 The token reduction is considerable, starting with curated data from Stack Overflow. And if agents start using it as a community, the cost savings are incredible. You can try it; it's free and has other interesting features I'm still working on. Save tokens, save trees.
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