Why is GPT-3 expensive and slow for Non-English languages?

A quick look at GPT-3’s tokenization

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How can a word like స్త్రీ (meaning woman in Telugu, an Indian language) come upto 18 tokens in OpenAI’s GPT-3 whereas “woman” in English is 1 token?

This also means it is 10–20x expensive as well as 10–20x slower to support a GPT-3 based app in Telugu because GPT-3 needs to…