Developer Argues Tokens Are the Wrong Unit for Pricing Multimodal Compute

Google DeepMind's Prateek Jain argues that tokens are a text-era pricing unit unfit for the physical world, as token counts for the same video vary across models, and multimodal compute may instead be billed per video second or per scene.

2026-11-11 ~ 2026-11-11 · 3 related posts

• Tokens are the wrong unit for the physical world, dev argues; vision compute will be priced in video-seconds and scenes — prateekj · 2026-11-11
• DeepMind researcher: multimodal compute will be priced in world units, not tokens — prateekj · 2026-11-11

1 near-duplicate retellings: prateekj