Text or Pixels? It Takes Half: On the Token Efficiency of Visual Text Inputs inMultimodal LLMs

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Paperium

Half the Tokens: Turning Text into Pictures to Supercharge AI

Ever wondered if a picture could carry the same story as a long paragraph? Scientists discovered that feeding AI a snapshot of text can cut the amount of “reading bits” it needs by almost half—without losing meaning.
Imagine writing a whole essay, then snapping a photo of the page and showing it to a friend; they still get every idea, but you’ve saved the effort of typing each word.
By turning lengthy documents into a single image, modern AI models understand the content just as well while using far fewer internal tokens.
Tests on tasks like summarizing news articles and searching long documents showed the same quality results, but with a dramatic reduction in processing load.
This clever shortcut means faster responses and lower costs for the services we use every day.
It’s a simple trick that could make AI assistants more efficient for everyone, and the future might just look a little more visual.

Read article comprehensive review in Paperium.net:
Text or Pixels? It Takes Half: On the Token Efficiency of Visual Text Inputs inMultimodal LLMs

🤖 This analysis and review was primarily generated and structured by an AI . The content is provided for informational and quick-review purposes.

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Paperium

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Paperium | Sciencx (2025-11-14T20:10:42+00:00) Text or Pixels? It Takes Half: On the Token Efficiency of Visual Text Inputs inMultimodal LLMs. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/14/text-or-pixels-it-takes-half-on-the-token-efficiency-of-visual-text-inputs-inmultimodal-llms/

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" » Text or Pixels? It Takes Half: On the Token Efficiency of Visual Text Inputs inMultimodal LLMs." Paperium | Sciencx - Friday November 14, 2025, https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/14/text-or-pixels-it-takes-half-on-the-token-efficiency-of-visual-text-inputs-inmultimodal-llms/

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» Text or Pixels? It Takes Half: On the Token Efficiency of Visual Text Inputs inMultimodal LLMs | Paperium | Sciencx | https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/14/text-or-pixels-it-takes-half-on-the-token-efficiency-of-visual-text-inputs-inmultimodal-llms/ |

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