Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#2Does this mean we’ll finally get empirical proof for the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_...
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#3Why are completion tokens more with image prompts yet the text output was about the same?
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#4Does this mean we’ll finally get empirical proof for the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_...
I suppose it’s only worth 256 words at a time right now. ;)
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#5Does this mean we’ll finally get empirical proof for the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_...
I suppose it’s only worth 256 words at a time right now. ;) https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929
The CALM paper https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM/ says it is possible to compress 4 tokens in a single embedding, so... image = 4×256=1024 words > 1000 words. QED
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose it’s only worth 256 words at a time right now. ;) https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929
The CALM paper https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM/ says it is possible to compress 4 tokens in a single embedding, so... image = 4×256=1024 words > 1000 words. QED
2.4% relative error is not bad.
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#7Why are completion tokens more with image prompts yet the text output was about the same?
"Thinking" Mode
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose it’s only worth 256 words at a time right now. ;) https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929
The CALM paper https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM/ says it is possible to compress 4 tokens in a single embedding, so... image = 4×256=1024 words > 1000 words. QED
how do you decompress all those 4 words from one token?
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#9In my experience, LLMs tend to take noticeably longer to process images than text.
Re: Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?
#10[deleted]