AI researcher and data journalist Simon Willison has used the Google AI Studio tool to convert a 35-second screen recording of 12 emails into a single spreadsheet. This experiment surprised Willison, who did not expect the AI to return accurate results at such a low cost. According to his blog (h/t Ars Technica), AI Studio charged him 11,018 tokens for this action, and with a cost of 7.5 cents per million token, this exercise amounts to less than 10% of 1 cent.
Willison didn't want to manually search for the data that was strewn across 12 emails, copying the data into a spreadsheet and then work on it from there. Instead they created an incredibly simple prompt, "Turn this into a JSON array where each item has a yyyy-mm-dd date and a floating point dollar amount for that date" that searched through the 35 second video and returned all of the data in a JSON formatted objects.
