Filed under value-measurement
Every brief tagged "value-measurement".
- § 01 · AI-AGENTS
Tokens Meter Input, Not Value: Hong Yanqing on Beijing's Agent Measures (Part 4 of 4)
Part 4, closing Hong Yanqing's commentary on the Several Measures of Beijing Municipality on Accelerating Agent-Led Development (北京市关于加快智能体引领发展的若干措施, 京发改〔2026〕1185号). The Measures' Article 6 proposes a Token (词元) economy — Token-as-a-Service, Agent-as-a-Service, Results-as-a-Service, and a shift from billing by Token consumption to value-based billing; Article 8 funds 'Token factories' and Token vouchers. Hong draws the line the policy still needs: Tokens measure the consumption of intelligent means of production, not the value of intelligent products. Tokenization differs across models; a task's full cost includes tool calls, memory storage, human review, and failed retries; and Token volume has no fixed ratio to task value — so treating Token throughput as industrial performance rewards long contexts, loops, and retries. His alternative is a five-layer evidence chain (resource input → system capability → valid task results → process results → enterprise and social value), a cost-per-valid-completed-task formula that counts review, retries, and expected risk losses, and an attribution discipline of pre-launch baselines and phased pilots. Outcome billing must be corrected for quality and risk — narrow metrics make customer-service agents rush calls and procurement agents chase price cuts, and vendors can cream-skim easy tasks while humans absorb the hard residue — so projects with unstable task boundaries should blend base, resource, and performance fees rather than jump to pure Results-as-a-Service. Different policy objects need different-layer metrics, mapped onto Part 3's five maturity levels, and fiscal support should pass staged evidence gates: prototypes may fail, pilots must beat baselines in real business, demonstrations must replicate at acceptable cost, and commercial-stage projects must survive subsidy taper — with prompt exit for projects that stop producing new evidence.