There’s this really neat economic index. It can be correctly interpreted in several basic contexts at once. For better or worse, that blurs the usefulness of the index — but keeping an eye on it at least stirs up some strategic brain activity about the money mood of the markets in the AI/IT economy.
In short, the index shows how much people and businesses are willing to pay for AI (per million tokens). On its own the index doesn’t yield any explicit conclusions, because rising values here could mean just about anything 😁:
- Models have become more useful.
- There’s more money in the IT economy.
- The AI-hype narrative has become more effective.
- Money freed up from salaries is now being spent on tokens.
- Tokens got cheaper (sure), and models started doing more useful work.
- Tokens got more expensive, and removing the dependency on them is, let’s say, already problematic ))
So yes, that’s exactly the interpretive blurriness I’m talking about. Still, I personally like this index — because it triggers fun hypotheses.
I’m not sharing a direct link, because the index is paywalled.