Burkov: closed LLM providers bill you for hidden thinking tokens you can never verify
burkov · x · 2026-09-19
Andriy Burkov raises a pointed concern: when using closed-weight LLMs, users pay for thinking tokens that providers never send back to the caller, so there's no way to verify they were actually generated. Advertised prices like $2/1M input and $10/1M output could be underpriced, with hidden reasoning tokens padding the bill. He also questions why some models force reasoning to stay on at least at a minimal effort level.
Related event: Burkov questions opaque thinking-token billing in closed LLMs(2 posts)→
More from Models
- Unposted demo videos of Gemini 4 Pro reportedly look impressive — ChrisGPT · 2026-09-19
- Constrained decoding makes models dumber, developer argues — here's the simple math — narphorium · 2026-09-19
- Practical Jev uses: classifying prompts by tier and auto-detecting refusals — QuixiAI · 2026-09-19
- Jev hype explained: a classifier that picks answers instead of writing them, fast and cheap — eptwts · 2026-09-19
- Same classification a gazillion times? Train a classifier, not prompt an LLM — QuixiAI · 2026-09-19
- RL-trained classification model Laya trends on Hugging Face — convaiinnovations · 2026-09-19