> I don’t see how tokens can’t produce speech or track metabolic needs.

It probably could, but the point is this would require additional tokens, blowing up the comparison. The token output of LLMs and "token output" of speech are simply at different abstraction levels. Hence my comparison to the LLM brain driving the robot harness to produce speech etc. This would be more comparable, and also look significantly worse than "only" the 22x less efficient number.