> pay-per-use LLM APIs are basically incentivized to be verbose There's competing incentives. Being verbose, let's them charge for more tokens, but it's also not prized by text-consumers in the most common contexts. As there's competition for marketshare, I think we see this later aspect dominate. Claude web even ships with a "concise" mode. Could be an issue long term though, we'll have to wait and see!

> In an optimistic sci-fi line of thinking, I would imagine APIs using old-school telegraph abbreviations and inventing their own shortened domain languages.

In the AI world this efficient language is called "neuralese". It's a fun rabbit hole to go down.