THE HIDDEN TAX OF AI

Output Is King

INPUT COST $2.50 Per 1M Tokens (GPT-4o)

4x MORE OUTPUT COST $10.00 Per 1M Tokens (GPT-4o)

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The reason? The AI writes very slowly on the inside — one token at a time.

Last article we saw the Transformer architecture. Today we watch it in action during live generation — and discover why the output side is 4x more expensive.

Here's something that surprises most developers when they first hear it:

ChatGPT doesn't think its answer in advance and then display it.

It predicts one token. Then another. Then another. Each prediction uses the previous ones as context. It's not writing — it's recursively predicting.

Remember how the Transformer reads everything in parallel (previous article)?…