After writing this Token series for so long, I want to tackle one final, unavoidable question.
What exactly is the relationship between Token and intelligence?
Many readers wrote in after the earlier installments:
If AI training runs on Tokens, inference runs on Tokens, and Agents are voraciously consuming Tokens — doesn't that mean Token equals intelligence?
The answer is both yes and no.
Let's start with no. Because intelligence is clearly more than just Token.
Just as a person's thoughts are not equal to the words they speak. A scientist's great discovery is not equal to the few dozen pages of the published paper. Einstein's theory of relativity is not equal to the tens of thousands of words in that paper. Words are merely carriers of thought. Similarly, Token is merely a carrier of intelligence — whether in the form of text, voice, or video.
But if we conclude from this that Token is unimportant, that would also be wrong.
Because we can never see thought itself. We can only see the traces thought leaves behind. A sentence, an article, a piece of code, a design draft, a video. The same is true of large models. We can't see the billions of calculations inside the neural network. We can't see the weight matrices. We can't see Attention. The only thing we can perceive is Token.
We cannot directly trade intelligence, but we can trade Token. We cannot directly measure intelligence, but we can measure Token.
At this point, a more fitting analogy suddenly occurred to me.
Money.
Dollars, yuan, gold — none of them equals wealth. True wealth exists in land, factories, goods, services, technology, and labor. But why can't modern society function without money? Because money provides a unified form of value expression — what Marx called a commodity equivalent — that can be measured, circulated, traded, and accumulated.
Today's Token is playing a similar role. It is not intelligence itself, but it increasingly resembles the currency of intelligence.
Over the past few years, the entire AI industry has essentially been revolving around Token. During training, people discuss how many trillions of Tokens were used. During deployment, they discuss how many Tokens per second can be processed. When purchasing APIs, they discuss how much input Tokens cost and how much output Tokens cost. When Agents run, they discuss how many Tokens were consumed for input and output. Even competition between nations is increasingly manifesting as: who can produce high-quality Tokens more cheaply.
Thus Token has gradually evolved from a technical term into an economic concept.
Of course, there is one point that is particularly easy to confuse. The same Token plays entirely different roles during training versus inference.
During training, Token is more like ore. Massive amounts of data are shredded, compressed, refined. Countless Tokens are smelted into model weights during training. The process resembles steelmaking, oil refining, turning ore into steel.
Inference is completely different. The model is already trained. What users purchase is not the training process but the output results. At this stage, Token is more like electricity, like money — more like an intelligence product delivered to the user. You ask AI to write articles, write code, make presentations. What you receive is Token. Even video, images, and voice will ultimately be priced through Token.
So from the user's perspective, intelligence almost always appears wrapped in the cloak of Token. This is why many people get the feeling that Token equals intelligence. It's actually as natural as associating money with wealth — because money and wealth have always been two sides of the same coin. Token and intelligence are increasingly becoming two sides of the same coin.
But history also tells us: don't mistake money for wealth itself. Similarly, don't mistake Token for intelligence itself.
To summarize. What is Token? It is the standard unit of measurement after data is industrialized and fragmented. Why tokenize? Because only by breaking things down can we count them; only by counting can we train. Why is AI consuming ever more electricity? Because the entire industry is producing and consuming Token at massive scale. Why are Agents exploding? Because machines have begun producing, exchanging, and consuming Token themselves. Why is Token getting cheaper? Because industrialization is underway. Why are nations competing over Token? Because Token is becoming a new means of production.
Ultimately, Token is to intelligence what money is to wealth. It is not wealth itself, but it is wealth's most important form of expression. It is not intelligence itself, but it is the way intelligence is produced, circulated, traded, and perceived. The internet era flowed with information. The AI era flows with Token. And what flows behind Token may well be the thing humanity has begun to produce industrially for the first time: intelligence.
