According to CoinMeta, as reported by Decrypt, employees of Meta consumed 60 trillion AI tokens within 30 days earlier this year in pursuit of an internal leaderboard called “claudeonomics”. Tech columnist Gergely Orosz estimates that the cost was around $900 million, although the actual cost incurred by Meta could be much lower than that. Bain and Company consultant Jue Wang pointed out that many companies and users default to using Opus for all operations, including generating emails. She told The Associated Press this summer that if you do the same, it’s equivalent to hiring Einstein to calculate the change at McDonald’s. Every word you type in ChatGPT or Claude and every word it outputs is measured in tokens, with an average of about three-quarters of a word per token. In a $20 subscription, this metric determines how quickly you reach the usage limit.