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LLM conciseness prompts save money, shorten input prompts cost more

A new study has found that instructing Large Language Models (LLMs) to be concise in their output can significantly reduce costs without compromising accuracy. The research tested this method across nine different LLMs, including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, demonstrating an average cost saving of 1.5x, and up to 3x in some cases. Conversely, shortening input prompts proved to be counterproductive, leading to increased costs and reduced accuracy as models attempted to compensate for missing information. The study also noted that while concise outputs are often correct, they may not always reflect the model's unconstrained reasoning process. AI

IMPACT Instructing LLMs to be concise can reduce operational costs for AI applications without sacrificing output quality.

RANK_REASON Research paper analyzing LLM behavior and cost-effectiveness. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on r/MachineLearning →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

LLM conciseness prompts save money, shorten input prompts cost more

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Research paper analyzing LLM behavior and cost-effectiveness. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. r/MachineLearning TIER_1 English(EN) · /u/ibubbles34 ·

    Does telling an LLM to "be concise" actually save you money? We measured it across 9 models. Compressing the output can save you money and keep accuracy, compressing the input prompt does not. [R]

    <!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>LLMs are too verbose and with a black box model the only things you control are what goes in and how you tell it to write back. Yesterday Claude Code shipped a &quot;concise output style&quot; where Claude keeps things short. We already have a pa…