[electrotype]

What about: "Read this document online : [URL]" and you add your text/context to an online document?

Would that reduce the number of tokens used too?

[mrbnprck]

Documents are processed as tokens as well, unless its bitmap is ocr'd.

Images tho are natively compatible with Multi-Modal LLMs, so theres no image->text translation layer in between. It's that the unit of cost is different (e.g. "visual token" vs text token)

[electrotype]

I see. I was thinking that it might be different if the document wasn't provided by you directly, but instead if the LLM fetched it itself online.