AI Tokens

“And in fact, I would argue that we're, for some size of model, we are approaching a trillion tokens being measured in, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.”

“The overwhelming majority of tokens are profitable for everyone in the chain. Everyone. And I think the Anthropic S-one is kind of going to make that clear.”

“There is no world in which I don't see corporations and people in the economy spending five or 10% of the salaries of their employees on the equivalent in tokens. In other words, somebody makes 80,000 dollars a year on average, they're gonna, you will spend 80…”

“You have to see around a hundred million fold growth over the next six years in terms of tokens. Is it possible? Absolutely. It's possible. Is it likely? No, it's not likely, but it could happen.”

“All the software spend is going to put 10% of their top line into tokens.”

“I have heard and I have observed that top engineers who are really leaning in to cloud code codex and so on are spending more than a 100,000 dollars on a run rate basis on tokens per year.”

“Meta employees consumed 73.3 trillion AI tokens in a single month, which roughly costs two hundred and twenty one million a month or around 2.65 billion a year.”

“But, yeah, so hopefully they get cheaper with time, energy gets cheaper, compute gets cheaper, and then these things get cheaper, but at the current state, absolutely. I think 20% is definitely within reason.”

“And what was really cool is we are now seeing our usage of AI tokens is still continuing to grow exponentially, but the cost curve has really started to flatten.”

“I'm spending a million dollars a year on tokens.”

“Like Peter Steinberger apparently is spending a million or 1.1 million dollars a month. That is, like, sort of the frontier of what you can do with this stuff.”

“I think going into 20, 27, CIOs and others are gonna be like, okay, just show me the F and ROI. We're not gonna, not just gonna ration tokens based on who we like the most in the company and who makes the best PowerPoint pitch. Show me the ROI.”

“Since January, 20, 25 through May, 2026, so last month per business spend on AI tokens is up 15 X. And that's amongst firms that were already spending on AI.”

“And sooner or later, I expect the cost of money, what I'm going to spending on tokens is going to be way north of what I'm spending on compute someday.”

“If we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, you know, that will basically be free in a year or two, that, that, that, that token, you know, supply is going to go up so much.”

“I actually think it can be as low as zero percent for some individuals, and it can be as high as like 1010 of thousands of percent for some individuals.”

“I would say order of magnitude will probably be comparable to salary.”

“The one argument I'll fight back with is this is going to burn a lot of tokens, and if you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at Peter's tweet, where in one month he burnt 1.3 million dollars worth of tokens.”

“What you spend a 100,000 or a million dollars a year on now, it will be commonplace like in, in two years, right? It'll, it won't cost a 100,000 in a year. It'll cost 10,000. And the year after that, it'll be like a couple hundred bucks, right? And everyone wi…”

“We've had that. We've had to like turn teams off who've spent too much money on tokens. You know, maybe it wasn't for all the right things. We're like watching what people are doing and going, wait a second, I don't think we want you to use AI for that. You kn…”

“And I just realized, you know what, like, I spent almost half a million dollars in token for my startup right now.”

“We probably, I don't think it will, it won't be published by the time this airs, but we have a very well-known figure in the tech industry who's writing an op-ed for us, laying out an entirely new tax regime, aiming to address this very issue, right? Aiming to…”

“The tokens are not going to be cheap anytime soon. And so the ROI on those tokens will just be much higher in the enterprise because it'll be, you know, generating something that is sort of, you know, impacts the GDP in some way.”

“Like, for me right now, I'm like, yeah, we should probably waste a lot of tokens, because that means that we're, like, trying new things.”

“People were on MIPS and then one day the reality was IBM was selling more MIPS for fewer dollars every year. And didn't even realize it. And they were still pricing their mainframes by MIPS until it got pointed out to them that they were on a decreasing curve …”

“If that 500,000 dollar engineer did not consume at least 250,000 dollars worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.”

“The lowest cost token is going to be the one that's generated right where the data is on the device.”

“I would argue there's not a strong correlation between token usage or utilization and value. There may be, but there's not always”

“We could reach a point when, for instance, currency will be AI tokens, or even time on servers, or data. That AIs will trade with other AIs for tokens or for data, not for dollars. And the human currencies, like dollars and euros and yens, they will become irr…”

“Because of the insane demand for AI tokens, a lot of model providers are unreliable or out of capacity.”

“Everyone will consume every available token.”

“So eventually we're going to get to a point where customers are no longer going to just be paying for the intelligence tokens. They're going to be paying for the workflow software that goes on top of the tokens themselves.”

“And Microsoft said that in their Q-one they processed a hundred trillion tokens 50 trillion alone in March.”