Unverified50% confidenceFactExact time
The output stage generates tokens serially one by one, and the cache cannot skip the computation of generation itself, so vendors have far less room for cost optimization on the output side than on the input side.
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50%
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Long-term
Relevance
10/21/2026
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Related Claims
VerifiedThe generation phase is essentially a serial process that cannot be fully parallelized the way input encoding can, resulting in relatively low GPU utilization—this is the technical reason why output costs are inherently higher than input costs.76% similarUnverifiedThe cost of constrained decoding is a possible slight loss of generation quality, but it has almost no impact on short-output tasks such as classification and scoring.72% similarUnverifiedThe price difference between input and output reflects the engineering reality that generating tokens requires more computation than processing tokens.71% similarUnverifiedSpeculative decoding improves generation speed without changing output quality.69% similarUnverifiedAutoregressive inference causes output cost to grow quadratically with sequence length, whereas the input side requires only a single parallel forward pass, which is the fundamental reason output tokens are priced higher than input tokens.69% similar
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