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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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At risk of stating the obvious - input tokens are everything you feed to the LLM, output tokens are everything you get back out of it. A word is usually 1 to 3 tokens, assorted markdown also eats tokens. The context window = input cap is 200k tokens, any more physically won't fit. For example, @gattsuru's Moby Dick prompt and Sonnet's response are 17 and 202 tokens respectively according to Claude's tokenizer. I'll take a blind shot based on my experience and say the average response for e.g. coding questions weighs 400-700 output tokens depending on how much detail you want. Do the math. For comparison, GPT-4's pricing is $30/1M input and $60/1M output, so you may wish to weigh your choice against your use case, GPT-4 IMO still has an edge over Claude in terms of cognition if writing style is a non-factor.

Input tokens usually matter less, unless you like to keep track of the chat history instead of asking isolated questions (I do, obviously), or your use case is feeding it giant swathes of text that must be digested.

Ok, this gives me some idea. Thanks.

Claude isn't available in my country, sadly. Nor in many other European countries. :(

openrouter.ai has it available.

Neat. Thanks! Anything I should know about using that site? Do you trust it?

Trust..? I just ask it code questions, lol. They can sniff my 40k token Vulkan demo if they like.

Ok, but... as a non-coder and novice to LLMs etc I find the site confusing. The docs section is just filled with code snippets I understand nothing of. Who do I pay the money to in order to use e.g. Claude Opus? Do I pay per token or the full 75+15 USD at once for 1 million input+output tokens?

Yeah sorry, I didn't realize how confusing this would be. I use it with a custom LibreChat setup, but if the install steps start with "edit this yaml file and then docker compose up -d" they're not really very accessible. No, you can just use it like this:

  • sign in
  • link a credit card (or bitcoin) in Account>Settings>Credits
  • put a few bucks on the site
  • click the Chat link at the top
  • add Claude 3 Opus from the Model dropdown
  • deselect every other model
  • put your question in the text box at the bottom.

No, it's pay-as-you-go. You can see your per-query costs in the Account>Activity page.

Note that the default settings (lil arrow on the model) are very conservative, you may want to raise memory and max tokens.

Alright. Thanks. :)

From what I heard through the grapevine their policy on contentious content is mercurial and prone to changing, and their Claude 3 keys are "self-moderated", i.e. there is no strict moderation per se but the keys are injected with prefills/system prompts that complicate (but don't strictly deny) getting non-kosher and/or copyrighted outputs out of it. If that is not a problem they're a pretty reliable source from what anons say.

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