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Navveen Balani Making systems intelligent, efficient & responsible

Tokens are the new compute currency.

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Tokens are the new compute currency.
They seem cheap—fractions of a cent, a flicker of GPU time. But scale them across agents, retries, and escalations, and they explode into massive financial and environmental burdens.
💰 Pricing Reality (OpenAI API):
GPT-4o mini: $0.15/M input, $0.60/M output
GPT-4o: $2.50/M input, $10/M output
GPT-4.5: $75/M input, $150/M output

📊 For a 1,500-input + 500-output interaction:
Mini: ~$0.0005
Standard: ~$0.009
Premium: ~$0.19

At 1M daily users, that’s $15K/month (mini) to $5.6M/month (premium).
Now multiply that by agent chains, multi-model routing, and retries—costs rise fast.

🌍 The Carbon Shadow:
100M tokens/day = 30–1,000 kWh, enough to power 10–30 homes/day.
These emissions stay hidden in cloud dashboards—but they’re real, driven by compute-hungry infrastructure.

Agentic AI must be lean by design—efficient, intentional, and accountable.
🔗 Learn more at leanagenticai.com

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