Token Econ.

Just like any commercial gaming platform, a company has many incentives to replace recognizable units of value like dollars and cents with some fiat that allows them to arbitrarily change the value at will. With LLMs it gets worse. Not only do they arbitrarily define tokens as having a certain value, that value will vary among multiple models published by the same company. It may change between versions of the same model. It feels nice when the old models get "cheaper", but it's all an illusion. Especially since they are also in control of the tokenization process. As Tom Waits^* says in Step Right Up "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away."

^*_{While researching in which song Tom Waits sang this lyric, I discovered that Tex Williams & His Western Caravan had a whole song titled The Big Print Giveth (And The Little Print Taketh Away) Give me Tom Waits anytime, but credit where credit is due.}