And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.

And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.

IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.

(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)

But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.

In your analogy, the "CRUD app" is analogous to the car, but that's not what Thompson is defining to be the unit of "intelligence". He's saying that some number of units of "intelligence" are necessary to create that CRUD app, somewhat analogously to how some number of units of energy are necessary to create a car.

But I agree with you that this concept of a "unit of intelligence" that he's using is probably too abstract to ever be usefully well defined.

Edit to add: I think what he's saying is more like "tokens aren't the interesting commodity, 'intelligence' is", which makes more sense. To carry on my gas and electricity analogy, I would say the same thing about gas being the less interesting commodity than electricity, because electricity can be used for a broader set of useful things. But both things are commodities, despite one being an input and the other being an output in this case, and the conversion efficiency is one very important consideration, but not the only one.

This is most obvious with the pardon power. In the debate about its inclusion, the argument was "well if a president uses that power corruptly, they will be impeached". But no, that was wishful thinking. The same is true of "emergency" tariff powers and a bunch of other things.