相同问题，不同模型——成本差异达45倍：代币经济学的实践

The performance of GPT-4 has decreased to 1/100th of its cost from two years ago. By March 2026, the price disparity between 'budget' and 'premium' large language models (LLMs) exceeds 1,000x. Mistral Nemo charges $0.02 per million tokens, while o3 Pro costs $375. Despite both being 'LLM API calls', their prices differ by four orders of magnitude. Understanding and leveraging this gap is referred to as Token Economics, while automating this process is known as Model Routing. In the realm of LLMs, tokens function as currency, with a token being the smallest unit of text processed by an LLM. In English, approximately four characters equal one token. Different requests, while having the same intent, can vary significantly in token count, highlighting the importance of tokens in cost management.