Tokens are the wrong unit for the physical world, dev argues; vision compute will be priced in video-seconds and scenes
prateekj · x · 2026-11-11
Developer prateekj argues that tokens are the wrong pricing unit for physical-world intelligence. A minute of video converts to different token counts across Gemini, Qwen and other models, with no shared standard. In 3D it breaks down entirely — a gaussian splat or reconstructed room has no token count at all. People buying compute for vision think in images, video-seconds, scenes and objects, so he predicts infra for this kind of intelligence will eventually be priced in units of the world rather than units of text.
Related event: Developer Argues Tokens Are the Wrong Unit for Pricing Multimodal Compute(3 posts)→
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