GPT-4-o-Mini Vision Token Cost Issue

[jr.2509]

Hi and welcome to the Forum!

gpt-4o-mini is known to consume a significantly higher amount of tokens relative to gpt-4o or other models, making the cost for image processing essentially similar across models.

Here’s a thread from July discussing this in greater detail.

GPT-4o-mini high vision cost

I noticed that the vision cost for the new mini model is as high as for the normal gpt-4o model. At first i thougt the calculator on the pricing page is wrong, but after testing out the api in my nodejs application I can sadly confirm that gpt-4o-mini uses about 33x more tokens for an image while being cheaper 33 times than gpt-4o. What is the reason behind this ? I assume gpt-4o-mini cant do vision natively so the request is handled by gpt-4o ? Would appreciate some clarification. With visio…

Additionally, as also referenced in the thread, here is an X post by the OpenAI Head of Developer relations on this very point:

Romain Huet (@romainhuet) on X

In fact, it would currently even be 50% cheaper to process an image with the latest snapshot of gpt-4o-2024-08-06 compared to gpt-4o-mini given its recent price decrease.