The vocabulary

Member lesson

The words for cost and speed

Lesson 7 of 9 in The vocabulary.

AI Foundations: Tokens & Pricing · Cursor
Lesson

Cost vocabulary is where studios get caught, because the headline price is rarely the thing you pay. Text is billed by tokens in and tokens out, at different rates. Images are billed by size, by steps and by a quality setting with an innocuous name. Video is billed by the second. The second is expensive.

Along a canal, a cyclist speeds down the towpath carrying one parcel. On the water, a slow, wide barge piled with hundreds of crates moves steadily along behind.
The bike wins on one parcel. The barge wins on the week. Know which one your job needs.
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Members answer these 3 questions and keep the ticket for this lesson. Every lesson has one.

  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The unit text is billed in. Input and output are usually priced differently.”

    • ControlNet
    • Token
    • Weights
    • Context window
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “How long one request takes. Distinct from throughput.”

    • Epoch
    • C2PA
    • Latency
    • Frame interpolation
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “How much you can get through per hour. What decides a batch job.”

    • Indemnity
    • Temporal coherence
    • Throughput
    • Open weights

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