Token Usage as Productivity Metric

Karri Saarinen laid out the hypothetical. But as work becomes AI-enabled, token usage is emerging as a proxy for productivity. The more tokens you burn, the more you're perceived as producing. I've heard investors say that token consumption is one way to measure how "AI-native" a startup is or how much staying power they have.

The winner in this economy is the foundation model company making money on token usage. They've successfully aligned their business model with maximizing productive outcomes.

I wonder if we'll see a similar trend as we did when we started thinking more employees equals more output. Will the measure flip from "how many tokens can you burn?" to "how little token usage can you achieve for how much outcome?"