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tokenasym
confirmedPython · llama.cppInference & servingJuly 6, 2026
the question
How much more does an output token cost than an input token?
what came out
An order of magnitude more: 12.8x for the 1.5B, 22.0x for the 0.5B (input 0.48/0.17ms vs output 6.18/3.69ms), and the gap grows with prompt length. Prefill is cheap; generation is where the bill is. All three pre-registered predictions held.
method & receipts
- Result: confirmed
- Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
- Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/tokenasym