It's a terrible metric, it's kind of like companies paying employees by the hour for white collar work.

Most people here probably don't know what it was like to work a contract job and being paid based on actual deliverables.

The incentive of AI companies is to create as many tokens as possible to solve any given problem. Just like your incentive as a software engineer is to create as much complexity as possible in order to use up as many hours as possible.

This is why big tech companies have millions of lines of code... They've got thousands of engineers rapidly churning out tokens.

The difference in number of tokens I use in my day job vs side projects is massive. You can see the inefficiency quantified.

Show me the incentive, I show you the result.