What determines AI cost?
Practice this question- Input/output usage, model pricing, tool/search calls, embeddings, retries, and infrastructure.
- Human review and failed tasks also matter.
- I calculate total cost per completed useful task rather than only one API call.
Adapted from 13_AI.MD · “29.17 Cost optimization”. Code examples are study fragments. Difficulty and core labels are editorial estimates; version-specific behavior should be checked against your project.