Intelligence is $20 a month
We can speculate. The origin could be as innoculous as “it’s the going rate for premium subscriptions, see Netflix” or “yea, that’ll be enough to tease investors without terrifying users”. And that line of thinking (or some variant of monkey-see-monkey-do) propagated the price to all the rest.
But speculation is no fun. We won’t be able to answer exactly why $20 a month is the price, but we can have a more thoughtful discussion on whether $20 a month makes sense based on the cost of the underlying technology. And by that I mean, the cost of creating a ChatGPT-like application using an AI company’s underlying APIs.
All these prices are less than $20 but with the ominous condition of per 1M tokens. 1 million tokens sounds like a lot but what the hell is a token? When we chat, we think in terms of words and sentences and paragraphs, so let’s bring this pricing back to human-readable terms.
A token is the smallest unit of language that a large language model “understands”. Whether a token maps to a word or a character or something else all depends on what method you use to tokenize your text.
