I notice that when I ask ChatGPT a question the answers I get back seem more verbose than they were a year ago. Where a 1-2 line response would be sufficient GPT delivers a sprawling essay. Overall the value of the answer has probably gone down, but tokens are up.
You can quite easily ask it to summarize the result in a sentence or paragraph. LLMs have no other way to compute than write text and the more text they write the more compute they do. You only care about the final output.
I do. It typically goes on to write a preamble about why it gave a long answer before finally providing a summary. Token stuffing.
I've just set my (free) ChatGPT to "Robot" in style options, so far I like its style and level of detailedness