OpenAI released the pricing plan for accessing GPT3 services a week ago. To further understand what these pricing tiers mean, what is the monthly cost for an application, and what are implications to business decisions, I will share some of my findings.
The Plans:
The pricing plan has been settled into 4 tiers: Explore, Create, Build, and Scale. For the “Create” plan, you will pay $100 per month for 2M tokens, and 8 cents per additional 1K tokens. The price for fine-tuning is categorized in the “Scale” plan, and the fine-tuning is currently only available to selected users and applications.
What are the tokens? The difference with words?
Tokens are pieces of words, or you can call them subwords. It is common in the NLP world to leverage tokens to handle unknown words also improve efficiency(handling more words by merging across subwords).
For example, the word “lower” gets broken up into the tokens “low”, “er”, the word “Descartes” gets broken up into the tokens “Desc”, “art” and “es”, while a short and common word like “pear” is a single token. On average, in English text, one token is roughly 4 characters. If you are interested in different tokenization algorithms, recommend to check out Byte Pair Encoding and lectures…
