Token Usage for Images Remains Constant Regardless of Size - Is This a Bug?

[_j]

I just did a deep dive into what you can expect for token usage (and rate usage) for a variety of resolutions, detail settings, and models.

Are the vision tokens added to the tokens per request limit?

Yes, you can run it up over the input context limit on image tokens For example that can be demonstrated more quickly with a tier-1 account, you’ll get an API error if sending 30000 tokens that are considered towards the rate limit. However, the rate consumption hit is NOT the tokens of input prompt. It seems the API just guesses at or provides an arbitrary rate for images. To make a full demonstration, I created code with an image generator to make an arbitrary number of images at specified …

If the image resolution at detail:high takes the same number of tiles, the cost will be the same. This means anything from 513x513 to 1024x1024, or anything in between, results in 4 overlay tiles (on top of a base “low” image.)

There are also peculiarities in the internal downsizing even on detail:high. Your image will be downsized so the shortest dimension is at most 768 pixels. Send 3000x3000, the model sees 768x768 - 4 tiles of 512x512. Send 2000x500, the model sees 2000x500, also 4 tiles of 512x512.