What Are Your Input Tokens Worth?

A few days ago, Awni Hannun from Apple's MLX team posted on X about the limitations of measuring LLM work in tokens processed. His point was straightforward: "A watt-hour is a watt-hour regardless of who produced it. But there's several ways tokens processed may not be equal." I replied with what I thought was an obvious extension of his logic: "is this right? perhaps the value of the token is…