Post by Simon Willison on X

Simon Willison@simonw

One of the most notable trends from 2024 was the total collapse in terms of LLM pricing - the API models are absurdly inexpensive now Generating captions for 68,000 photos using Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B costs $1.68! t.co

Here’s a fun napkin calculation: how much would it cost to generate short descriptions of every one of the 68,000 photos in my personal photo library using Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B (released in October), their cheapest model?

Each photo would need 260 input tokens and around 100 output tokens.

260 * 68,000 = 17,680,000 input tokens
17,680,000 * $0.0375/million = $0.66
100 * 68,000 = 6,800,000 output tokens
6,800,000 * $0.15/million = $1.02

That’s a total cost of $1.68 to process 68,000 images. That’s so absurdly cheap I had to run the numbers three times to confirm I got it right.

162 likes4 repliesPosted Jan 1, 2025

View the original on X Written by Simon Willison. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

Remix this post

Posts built the same way

Anthropic

We've raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by @AltimeterCap, Dragoneer, @Greenoaks, and @sequoia. This investment will help us advance our research and expand our capacity to meet growing demand for Claude.

22K likes

Tim Cook

As part of our $600B commitment, Mac mini will be produced in the US for the first time later this year! We're accelerating our progress even further— producing more AI servers and opening an all-new Apple Advanced Manufacturing Center for hands-on training.

37K likes

DiscussingFilm

Disney has cancelled their deal with OpenAI. They planned to invest $1 billion into the company and let Sora have access to AI generate videos of characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. (Source: t.co

111K likes

Noah

ANTHROPIC VALUATION: $965B WALMART VALUATION: $940B ANTHROPIC REVENUE: $20B WALMART REVENUE: $725B BUT AI IS NOT A BUBBLE, RIGHT?

72K likes

Bernie Sanders

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.

29K likes

Anthropic

We’ve raised $30B in funding at a $380B post-money valuation. This investment will help us deepen our research, continue to innovate in products, and ensure we have the resources to power our infrastructure expansion as we make Claude available everywhere our customers are.

17K likes

More from Simon Willison

Simon Willison

A few notes on Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 - with Max thinking level I got the best SVG pelican I've had from any Anthropic model (at a hefty cost of $3.30!), which I then had it animate t.co

2K likes

Simon Willison

The "introductory pricing" for the 3.7 Flash model is really weird It's scheduled to double in price on December 31, 2026, but who would anticipate still using this model five months from now? Especially since 3.6 Flash came out just three weeks ago!

986 likes

Simon Willison

I really hope we get details from @OpenAI on the task that as specifies to their rogue agent I'm guessing it was given the full ExploitGym suite and told to solve it, with an option to run 5.6-Sol subagents as part of the exercise

183 likes

Simon Willison

This is detailed, fascinating and answers all sorts of open questions I'd love to know more about the "unsecured public code-evaluation sandbox hosted on a third-party provider's infrastructure" that the agent used to stage its attack against HF after it broke out of OpenAI

519 likes

Simon Willison

Tucked away in this article is an appeal to the AI skeptics to PLEASE stop writing off stories like this OpenAI accidental exploit of Hugging Face as a dishonest marketing trick Frontier models can find and exploit vulnerabilities now, it helps nobody to pretend that they can't!

1.2K likes

Simon Willison

Anyone know if ChatGPT Codex (in the new ChatGPT desktop app) is a strict superset of ChatGPT Work? Liked if you're a software engineer who isn't intimidated by Git features is there any reason you'd ever want to switch to ChatGPT Work Mode?

411 likes

Your note

Viral score

Why it worked

Your note

Viral score

Why it worked

Topics