News Summary

• Every time an AI model reads your prompt, writes an answer, or does a task, that work is measured in tokens.
• The more work a model does, the more tokens it typically processes.
• AI tokens could become a powerful new source of data, allowing researchers to track AI usage in almost real time and study its economic effects, with a kind of precision not possible in past technological revolutions."The story of AI is no longer just a Silicon Valley story," says Nicola Borri, Aleh Tsyvinski, and Yukun Liu.