Standard Definition
MEAT TOKEN /miːt ˈtoʊ.kən/
A discrete unit of biological cognitive expenditure. The metabolic cost of human attention required to resolve a task using nothing but the brain and body it was issued. The diametric opposite of an LLM token.
What does your task cost in meat?
Type it below. We'll price it in Meat Tokens and LLM Tokens.
Floating-point operations on warehouse-scale clusters. Emotionally inert.
Glucose, oxygen, and an unrelenting sense of dread.
Per 1k tokens of predicted text. Trivial.
Average metabolic labor per hour of focused cognition.
Confidently asserts the wrong thing. Cannot be embarrassed.
Stops working. Becomes embarrassed. Asks for coffee.
Figure 02 — Comparative Token Yield
Tasks, plotted by cost.
Log10 scale. Bars show the cost of doing each task SOLO — a naked human brain on one side, an LLM with nothing but API calls on the other.
Research
The Whitepaper: Biological Computation Limits
A rigorous examination of why human cognitive labor scales non-linearly compared to silicon tokens.
Lexicon
Meat-to-Silicon Glossary
From "Freezer Burn" to "Mise en Place." Mapping AI jargon to the cold reality of the butcher shop.