Study Confirms: Asking LLMs for Concise Outputs Actually Saves Money
ibubbles34 · reddit · 2026-08-22
A study tested cost and accuracy across 9 models by comparing input prompt compression vs. instructing models to be concise.
- Output Compression: Saves 1.5x cost on average (up to 3x), with similar accuracy. Works across languages too.
- Input Compression: Increases costs by up to 96% as models generate longer outputs to compensate, and accuracy drops.
- The findings suggest controlling output length via API prompts is a viable cost-saving strategy since output tokens are typically more expensive than input tokens.
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