I do wonder how much of the apparent demand is driven by companies automatically running these things when users didn't actually ask for it. For example every web search I make now has an AI response that I scroll right past. I'm sure that counts for someone's token usage data, but I got zero value from it. This is happening in almost every software product now.

Tokens as a metric is the analogue of users as a metric.

In the end value per user is what matters in relation to being a healthy going concern and valuation in relation to Meta for example. Value per token is what should matter too - after all that’s what people are paying for.