Running the Socrates playground and grader incurred low cost, with even gpt-4o consuming only $169.90¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Except for the more expensive gpt-4o, the models used cost very little, and gpt-4o itself consumed only $169.90 across the deployment. → Xinming Yang 2025

Evidence¶

Xinming Yang 2025¶

Xinming Yang, Haasil Pujara, Jun Li. (2025). Learning by Teaching: Engaging Students as Instructors of Large Language Models in Computer Science Education. Published as a conference paper at COLM 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05979 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.05979

q2 · i? · causal · r1

Cost analysis from logged playground and grader usage across assignments A1-A4, shown in Fig. 3a, comparing gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4o, and gemini-1.0-pro. The article reports "all other models incur a very low amount of costs" and "Even gpt-4o consumes only $169.90."

"We can see that exceptgpt-4o which is expected to be more intelligent and much more expensive, all other models incur a very low amount of costs which can be easily covered by an instructor. Even gpt-4o consumes only $169.90."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Gemini Flash 2.0 was selected for production over GPT-4o-mini and Llama 3.1 for its superior faithfulness and speed-to-cost ratio — related
• gpt-4o graded student submissions most correctly in almost all assignments, but gemini-1.0-pro graded the boolean-algebra assignment most correctly — related
• Simulated role play sessions cost $0.05-$0.10 each in the EducaSim deployment — related