- Published on
📝 From DAU (Daily Active User) to TPD (Tokens Per Day)
- Authors
- Name
- Chengchang Yu
- @chengchangyu
Everyone is still obsessed with DAU and user engagement.
OpenAI might be optimizing for something else entirely:
TPD — Tokens Per Day.
Not how often you log in. Not how long you chat. But how much work the model actually performs.
Think about this:
One user who logs in once a day but runs 20 autonomous agents nonstop is worth more than 100 users chatting 10 casual messages each.
That’s a radical shift.
The AI economy isn’t built on attention. It’s built on compute throughput.
In the social media era, value came from eyeballs. In the AI era, value comes from delegation.
The most valuable user is no longer the most engaged. It’s the one who offloads the most cognition.
If TPD becomes the north star metric, everything changes:
- Products optimize for automation, not conversation
- Interfaces shift from chat boxes to agent dashboards
- Power users become “AI orchestrators”
This isn’t just a new KPI.
It’s a new definition of productivity.