- The total cost of ownership for integrating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system or Large Language Model (LLM) is critical in sectors like healthcare, banking, and eCommerce.
- Pricing structures for AI systems are based on tokens or characters, which are foundational to AI model usage.
- Understanding query length from a token or character perspective can aid in judicious AI use during prompt engineering.
- AI system integration, software maintenance, staff training, and engineering team salaries are important considerations apart from subscription and usage fees when calculating the total cost of ownership of an AI system.
Understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) is crucial for businesses looking to leverage the powers of generative AI to streamline their legacy workflows. Enterprises across different sectors are now confronted with varying AI software pricing models and unit economics from different providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and others. A notable development in the price war was the announcement by Alphabet to lower the costs of its advanced AI model, Gemini from Google.
The pricing structures for AI systems introduce a new vernacular: tokens or characters. Major AI models, excluding Google’s, price their Language API costs based on the model selected and the number of input and output tokens. Tokens represent words within a set of sentences and sections of letters or sub-words, typically equating to four characters or about three-quarters of a word in English. Meanwhile, Google’s pricing strategy operates on characters, not tokens.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model is priced at $0.01 per 1,000 tokens for every input and $0.03 per 1,000 tokens for each output. Amazon’s Claude model, from Anthropic, is slightly lower at $0.008 per 1,000 tokens per input and $0.024 per 1,000 tokens per output. Anthropic’s pricing chart matches Amazon’s but is scaled up to $8 per one million tokens for prompting (input) and $24 per one million tokens upon query completion (output). Google’s pricing for Gemini is $0.00025 per 1,000 characters for every input and $0.0005 per1,000 characters for each output.
AI models function by associating each token or character representing chunks of text data with numbers using deep learning models. The pricing strategies of AI models vary with English-language based use cases. Image generation services and audio models have different pricing models that rely on image resolution and audio length respectively.
Understanding the impact of query length can help firms fine-tune their use of AI. It is noteworthy that pricing structures do not relate to model quality or performance impact. Therefore, organizations must assess their specific needs and budget as they look to integrate AI into their workflows. Costs like AI system integration, software maintenance, staff training, and engineering team salaries are all part of the TCO of an AI system.