It could be. Or just smarter caching (which wouldn't necessarily have to do with model intelligence). Or just overfitting on the 95% most common prompts (which could save tokens but make the models less intelligent/flexible).

Less cost to accomplish the same goal is a sign of intelligence. That's not necessarily achieved with less tokens but it may be.

Kind of? But I really care about price speed and quality. If it used 10x tokens at 1/10th the tokens and same latency I would be neutral on it.

Kimmi 2.6 for example seems to throw more tokens to improve performance (for better or worse)

With AGI we expect a huge return on investment and a GDP growth that could be accelerating at a rate we couldn't even comprehend. Imagine an algorithm that improves itself each iteration and finds ways to increase its capacity every day. Robots suddenly capable of doing dishes, grocery shopping, picking produce from the field. Imagine all your ailments handled... age becomes just a number.

Also with AGI we expect a winner take all situation. The first AGI system would protect itself against any other AGI system. Hence why it's go time for all these AI companies and why they stopped sharing their research.