At Baidu's Create 2026 developer conference, Robin Li dropped a hot take: the industry's obsession with token counts is misguided. Tokens are a cost, not a revenue metric — they measure what you put in, not what you get out. And they certainly don't tell you whether those tokens were put to good use.
So Li proposed a new metric: DAA, or Daily Active Agents. Think of it as the mobile internet's DAU (Daily Active Users), but for AI agents. His argument: the real value comes from how many agents are actually doing work, not how many tokens you burn through.