I was expecting a secondary market in tokens, perhaps crypto-powered, but no.
The cost difference for languages roughly correlates with how much text it takes to say something in that language. English is relatively terse. (This is a common annoyance when internationalizing dialog boxes. If sized for English, boxes need to be expanded.) They don't list any of the ideographic languages, which would be interesting.
The real reason is that tokens are probably strictly based on n-gram frequency of the training data, and English is the most common language in the training data.
The broader questions are still interesting.
If an AI is trained more on language A than language B but has some training in translating B to A, what is the overhead of that translation?
If the abilities are combined in the same model, how much lower is the overhead than doing it as separate operations?
ie is f(a) < f(b) < f(t(B,A) ? where a and b are in A and B and f() and t() are the costs of processing a prompt and the cost of translating a prompt.
Then there's the additional question of what happens with character based languages. It's not obvious how it would make sense to assign multiple tokens to a single character but there's the question of how much information in character based vs phonic based words and what the information content of sentences with either one is.
I also don't like how this article presents numbers for language differences - in the "The Language Tax" section - but fails to clarify which tokenizer and where those numbers came from.
The product itself seems genuinely useful, but the article reads very sensationalist about something that should be pretty obvious.
In other news: French publishers are paying 30% more for paper than English publishers!!
AI commits a racism.
AI commits an environmentalism.
Now use my product (that won't solve either)
You pay for what you use. That's the deal. Except it's not.
When you use an AI model — GPT-4, Claude, Gemini — you do not pay per word. You pay per token. And that tiny technical detail is quietly costing you, depending on which company you choose, up to 60% more for the exact same request.
As I said elsewhere, Deepseek injects Chinese characters into responses. Anecdotally, that seems to happen when the context gets longer. That suggests that they're primarily trained in Chinese and I would expect them to use fewer tokens for Chinese than English.