“Anchoring the unit back to the work is the trillion-dollar mission.”

A developer working on AI economics said that to me.

That’s exactly the problem.

Right now, AI is priced on tokens —
but tokens don’t represent the work being done.

Same token count
→ radically different compute
→ radically different cost

So everything downstream breaks:

• pricing
• margin control
• forecasting.

We’re measuring the output of the system,
not the work inside it.

And until the unit maps to the work,
AI economics will stay distorted.

– Published on Thursday, April 2, 2026