It also puts a thumb on the scale for AI, which tends to emit pages of text to answer simple questions.

Sounds like any post-secondary, graduate student, or management consultant out there being there are, very often, page/word count or hours requirements. Considering the model corpora, wordiness wins out.

The chart is actually words "thought or written" so I guess they are running up the numbers even more by counting Claudes entire inner monologue, on top of what it ultimately outputs.

these are not just “words” but answers to questions from people who got a job at anthropic had…

It's not merely cost per word, but it is even more bizarre: "cost per word thought", whatever that is. Most of these "word thoughts" from LLMs of today are just auto-completed large dumps of text.

There was a time when these models were novel that if use it to write for me. After a year or so the verboseness and lack of personality got old. Now all I have is a decent proofreader. Maybe they'll take over my job but I'm finding the trend going the other way right now.