Token

“In that month we spent roughly 1.5 million dollars worth of tokens. This is free, by the way. I, no, I don't want to but it was actually 10 X more we were spending in tokens than employee salary for that month.”

“It's a dangerous way to think about it, because if you think about it as like, they use more tokens every month that's successful. What if they're using the tokens in a way where the ROI is less clear to them? Meaning they don't realize that they're using toke…”

“We will let people go if they just go Bananas with something for no reason.”

“Across the A-sixteen Z portfolio... Best companies spending on tokens per month relative to human compensation... High single digits, some at 10%, like some of the very AI native ones, like 10% plus. And so, you know, and then old economy companies are spendin…”

“At Atreides, our internal token consumption has gone up a hundred X from the month of March, March through August, 100 X. Yeah. Our token spend.”

“When you're thinking about price, you should not be thinking about the inputs to the price. You should be thinking about the outputs. So I think about the price of the outcome.”

“And we're not in the time of token maxing anymore. You know, trying to go to actually getting value for every token that we have, because it becomes more and more and more and more and more and more and more expensive.”

“We think that whenever you make something 10 times cheaper, it's a new product category, and we aspire to do that for tokens.”

“I don't think tokens are the final unit of work or intelligence, but they are what we use today, and so it's very straightforward.”

“I think that you just five lines is all you need more than that. It's you're just going to be burning tokens in context.”

“And these tokens are among the most rapidly depreciating assets we've ever seen in a modern economy, that they've continually been falling 70 to 80% year over year on a constant performance basis for at least the last four years.”

“That's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or…”

“I mean, I think there's still just, like, astronomical opportunity in agentic looping, and figuring out how you develop systems that enable you to spend, like, 1000 X more or one million X more on tokens to drive an outcome in a continuous feedback loop.”

“So last month I spent probably 20 grand in, in tokens. Which is just too much. Like, it's not viable.”

“I think all of us are in a place where we, we're getting to the spot where it's realizing, okay, for real engineering work per employee, you're looking at probably five grand a month. Like, that's probably where we're gonna shake out here.”

“So, you must be in this token flow to either resell or repackage the tokens with your context and your very specific application. You serving the token with your intelligence? Is it the proprietary closed source token? Is it the open source token? Sitting on a…”

“My hottest take is that in the next 12 months, 90% of tokens will be going to open models.”

“You can consume any top tier developer can assume an order of magnitude more tokens than they are now. The ideas are limitless.”

“So in a world where computers are shortage, therefore, tokens are always going to be at a premium, and there's a shortage of tokens that we can produce, given the limited compute that we have”

“And as hopefully everyone listening to this will understand, like in the last six months or so, the sudden product market fit of agentic coding means that demand for tokens has gone up by many orders of magnitude, and the model labs have been sort of scramblin…”

“I think in a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, I'm just going to, you know, manage my payroll, and I have a philosophy about how I'm going to decide how much to spend on that. I'm going to manage my vendors. I think there's going to be a …”

“Unlimited tokens, I believe, means unlimited reasoning.”

“I think it's going to be just like every underestimated infrastructure forecast. We're going to spend X and we always spend X plus some multiple of that every single quarter. Everyone revises up. I think you're going to see revisions up on tokens for sure.”

“At the end of the day, tokens represent capacity and we're very constrained on capacity. We don't have enough energy. We don't have enough data centers and the demand is, is exponential. And so if I think about it from that angle, I think actually token costs …”

“If you project out maybe a year or two from now, do you think you're going to spend more on humans or tokens? And I don't think the answer is obviously humans. I think there's actually a good chance you spend more on tokens than you spend on humans.”

“The cost of tokens, Freeburg, is going to go down 90% a year for the next three years.”

“Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world.”

“We are in a new era of intelligence where the cost of producing intelligence is dramatically so much cheaper than the value of the intelligence that we are in a many year, probably many decade supply shortage of these tokens.”

“That the way you want this to scale is not that, oh, if I want to go serve 10 times more tokens, I buy 10 times more servers. It must be some solution where if I want to serve 10 times more tokens, then I get some economies of scale benefit with my say cluster…”

“Because, you know, the price of memory isn't getting cheaper. And the price of tokens aren't getting cheaper.”

“We have a used judiciously model for tokens. It's not a free-for-all. Free-for-all sounds like you can go token max the hell out of it. We have to use it judiciously, and we keep track of it to see what people are doing. And if we find somebody who's using it …”

“Buying off tokens is insanely complicated. It'll probably at some point go back to something like subscription because it's hard to like forecast these things.”

“Sure, if tokens are so expensive, they're going to be, I think over the fullness of time, probably free.”

“We see all these optimizations that happening that changes the price of the tokens in order of magnitude.”

“The vast majority of tokens that are used in coding are in QA anyway. It's not in production.”

“Right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount.”

“These persistent hardware devices, the watch, the ear pieces are going to know your entire reality. They're going to monitor your entire desktop, and this is going to lead to a use of tokens that would be a thousand times what user business users are currently…”

“In a year from now, we're not gonna be wasting tokens on mediocre web developers playing with stuff, and we're gonna clamp down on it because it's a huge waste.”

“I think we have kind of call it 500 days where you just got to be net long. But I think it's literally in the hundreds of days from now, 500, you're going to have to have an important reckoning moment. The people that are paying for all these tokens need to se…”

“One of the key maxims for YC is You know, how do you find good startup ideas, live in the future and build what's missing? Right. And so this is a profound version of that where all you have to do is commit your brain to look at, you know, spending 500 dollars…”

“But the truth is, Antropic probably grew tokens, 15 X in Q one, right?”

“If you only change the agent.md, oftentimes, you know, first of all, it costs a lot more tokens, but also it's too general, right? It doesn't apply to every single workflow out there.”

“I probably spent like 80 or a hundred honestly.”

“And so the vast majority of tokens and spend in the market, the good market, the good morning America audience is going to be going for cheap Quen effectively over time. And it's going to be because they care about the costs, right? Like that's going to be the…”

“It's pretty clear even the tier two lab is going to be sold out of tokens, let alone the tier one lab. The tier one lab will have better margins, but the tier two lab will be sold out, and probably the tier three lab will also be close to sold out.”

“It's pretty clear even the tier two lab is going to be sold out of tokens, let alone the tier one lab. The tier one lab will have better margins, but the tier two lab will be sold out and probably the tier three lab will also be close to sold out.”

“Instead of asking the person I'm going to ask the agent is a habit your brain has to learn and switch into. And for people in engineering, I think that's more native right now or product, but for people in sales or HR or, you know, even some just non-technical…”

“I think in general, the, like learning more, like extracting more from varied data points is definitely valuable, but I think that's what related to the fact that we're like running out of Tokens in the world.”

“So I think, you know, Google for sure has this temporary advantage right now from a pre-training perspective. I think it's also important that they've been the lowest cost producer of tokens, okay?”

“You're going to put those GB 300 in and then the companies that use the GB 300, they're going to be the low cost producer of tokens.”

“And actually two third, no, I would say roughly two thirds of our investing has always been that.”

“So now I'm also going to chart besides per seat, you know, charging you dollars per seat, but now I'm also going to charge you per token. This is a no, no. I call this showing your customers your underpants. You don't want to show your customers your underpant…”

“Tokens are part and parcel of what's valuable and interesting about crypto. And so if you remove that piece, it doesn't make any sense.”

“I like to say that tokens trump tariffs.”

“In the test time compute setting, you know, here, the state is tokens and the kind of like sleep time, like indexing process is a re-representation of those tokens into something that is like more easily queryable and more flexible.”

“Brian Armstrong tweeted that there's now a million new tokens created every week.”

“And so what's happened is every time we've seen the cost of tokens for a particular level of quality of models come down, we've actually seen the demand grow significantly.”

“These new data centers we're creating are not data centers. They don't, they're not multi-tenant. They tend to be single tenant. They're not storing any of our files. They're just, they're producing something and they're producing tokens.”

“In the last 18 months the price of a token has gone down by 200 X”

“So, will it go down to the next two years? I don't know, but it will probably go down by 10 X or 20 X”