I would challenge that a bit.
I'm not pushing the analysis forward to real use cases, I'm making the analysis more complete.
Your basically looking a cost/token, right? But I'm saying that there is no such thing as a language agnostic token, so you must think at the level of language. Ex: if you compared a Deepseek's revenue to OpenAI's, you must first convert RMB to USD or USD to RMB, right?
Theoretically, if you get deep enough into a model's layers, you can directly interact with its latent space, where you can achieve a sort of language-agnostic token (or a language that is native to the LLM). In fact, Looped LMs think at this level (instead of tokenspace).
But at the level of the input/output, the LLM cannot be divorced from language. 所以你必须得考虑语言