Sam Altman calls tokens “a kind of fake unit”: you can count them, but a token count does not tell a business what it got for the money.
The one defense of tokens is information-theoretic: models still stream noise along with signal, and once that waste is removed, token counts approach Shannon’s floor, the minimum needed to carry the actual information.
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Full video on "Cheeky Pint" YouTube channel, (link in comment)