> Assuming a highly motivated office worker spends 6 hours per day listening or speaking, at a salary of $160k per year, that works out to a cost of ≈$10k per 1M tokens.
I guess...if by office worker you mean a manager that does nothing but attend meetings and otherwise talk to people. For other workers you probably want to count the token equivalent of their actual work output and not just the chatting.
I suspect inner monologue is the useful metric for token count. I don't know if (any, let alone most or all) human brains think in token-like chunks, but if we do, and that's at 180/minute, thats 180x60x5x48 (working weeks/year) = 20,736,000 tokens/year. At that rate, $160k/year would be ~$7700/million tokens.
My guess is that this is better than a human who would cost $16k/year to hire. But with the logarithmic improvements in quality for linear price increases, I'm not sure it would be good enough to replace a $160k/year worker.
I guess...if by office worker you mean a manager that does nothing but attend meetings and otherwise talk to people. For other workers you probably want to count the token equivalent of their actual work output and not just the chatting.