Not All Tokens Are Equal: Inflation-Aware Routing for Agentic LLM Systems
Source
Heming Fu, Shan Lin, Qianqian Xie, Guojun Xiong
Author
Heming Fu, Shan Lin, Qianqian Xie, Guojun Xiong
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Why it matters
Per-tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → price is what most teams budget from, and it can understate real AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → cost by more than double on hard tasks. Measuring inflation per tier turns model selection into an arithmetic decision instead of a guess.
