Glossary term
Useful intelligence per dollar
A quality-adjusted measure of useful AI outcomes delivered for each dollar of spend.
Coined by Sarah Friar / OpenAI
Coined in the context of Sarah Friar's commentary at OpenAI, the phrase pushes back on optimizing for raw token efficiency alone. A cheaper answer that has to be redone is not efficient — this term ties reduced consumption to preserved output quality, rather than treating minimized token use as a goal in itself.
Related research