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AI models cost more when you don’t use English: Some languages require far more tokens for AI models to process, raising costs and reducing context for the people who use them. (restofworld.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

This is a title that's factually true, but in reality highly deceptive. The AI companies are riding bubbles and the prices they decide don't reflect the actual cost of anything. That's what a bubble is. So the title should read that the AI companies are gouging some of their customers because they can.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago*

    So the title should read that the AI companies are gouging some of their customers because they can.

    But that's not what the underlying study shows. It found that LLMs (including the ones you can self-host, not just the premium models) require more tokens to answer the same prompt in foreign languages versus in English. This is almost certainly a consequence of English being over-represented in the training data (and to a lesser extent, tokenizers that were designed with English in mind). It's not some intentional and nefarious price gouge.

    Don't get me wrong, I know for a fact that the frontier labs are engaged in all sorts of nefarious anti-consumer shit — but this ain't that.

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