[FEATURE] Add a way to predict or estimate expected tokens or expected costs

[davidberenstein1957]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Generation with reliance on external APIs might be expensive.

Describe the solution you'd like Something like a pipeline method expected_costs or expected_tokens

Describe alternatives you've considered Wait and see. Additional context Perhaps something like expected_time would also be interesting?

[strickvl]

All these would be really useful, I think. You'd want:

• expected costs for a particular pipeline (either calculated directly, or via directing to some API or online costs calculator for the particular LLMs involved). In the case of multiple LLMs involved, this might get complicated i.e.
• expected tokens to be used for a particular pipeline, and split by LLM / task (so you can manually make the calculation yourself if you want)
• add a 'max_budget' option for a param, which would either stop when you hit that estimated cost, or it wouldn't run the pipeline and would suggest ways to downscale the amount of work your pipeline does in order to stay within the costs?
• expected_time is maybe interesting, but probably hard to do. But I agree it'd be pretty useful if you could get a ballpark figure.

You might even consider abstracting some of this out into some online calculator tool where you just get the number of tokens for a raw data file and then for a typical task you could get a rough estimate of both time and cost for typical scenarios (i.e. gpt3.5 or claude-haiku etc). Just from a marketing standpoint having one of these HF spaces that do that might be attractive.

I think this'd all be really beneficial for the tool. In the end, you can only make very loose guesses right now based on small subsection runs and then try to extrapolate out.