{
  "id": 11114,
  "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91572876/the-ai-economy-runs-on-this-incredibly-vague-unit?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss",
  "title": "The AI economy runs on this (incredibly vague) unit",
  "summary": "Three-plus years into the AI boom, we’re all still figuring out what an AI token is actually worth. Welcome to the era of stochastic shopping. Tokens, at their core, are the tiny units of language that artificial intelligence systems ingest and process in order to reason, or at least mimic reasoning, and communicate with us. A token might be a punctuation mark, a word, or even part of a word. OpenAI suggests that, in English, one token is roughly equivalent to four characters, or about three-qua",
  "authors": "Rebecca Heilweil",
  "category": "news",
  "topics": "jobs-economy",
  "orgs": "openai",
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-07-16T10:11:00.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-17T05:10:53.887Z",
  "source_slug": "x-fast-company-tech",
  "source_name": "Fast Company Tech",
  "source_homepage": "https://www.fastcompany.com/technology",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/11114",
  "original_url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91572876/the-ai-economy-runs-on-this-incredibly-vague-unit?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}