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Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

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Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#11

Post by npodbielski »

xvxvx wrote: post #2

The linked Reddit thread is quite hilarious. Earlier this year my company hired a new CEO and his first company address was solely to tell everyone to use AI or they’d lose their job and become unemployable in general. I knew right there and then that he was a moron. There’s something about American companies where the best and brightest rarely show up in senior management. It seems to be populated by some weird clas…

For the long time this worked oh right: get to know right people, wipe some asses, lick some other, play some golf and be sociopath. But right now it does not cut it anymore. You have to be either smart, skilled or know your business and IT somewhat to now how and to what extent or if at all you can use so called AI in your company. People like you described are out of their league entirely.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#12

Post by Natalia724 »

One thing that seems under-discussed is how quickly token cost changes product behavior once people move from demos to recurring workflows.

When the interaction is exploratory, the marginal cost feels invisible: ask again, summarize again, try another agent. In a business workflow, the same pattern becomes a metering problem. You have to decide which parts actually need a frontier model, which can use a smaller/local model, and which should not be generated at all.

That probably pushes AI products away from "chat with everything" and toward much narrower tools with explicit ROI: less open-ended generation, more constrained pipelines, caching, evaluation, and human review at the points where mistakes are expensive.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#13

Post by rvz »

> “Can these AI labs collapse that cost [and] progress the tech enough in a way that it eventually meets in the middle with customers’ appetite for spending?” Sean wondered.

It depends where you buy the tokens from. Jevon's paradox exists in China and not in the US for now.

> In just a few months, companies became obsessed with “tokenmaxxxing,” then turned against it due to the high costs.

Casinos (in the US) telling customers to spend more on tokens, introduces free spins, discounts, resetting limits on peak hours. Then introduces new slot-machine that promises to give better odds to the gamblers, but instead is more expensive to use.

The ones in China did the opposite and made their discount on tokens permanent.

All this 'tokenmaxxing' was an outright scam. Now the AI companies want you 'tokenmaxxing' your agents on loops as the token prices increase.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#15

Post by gitgud »

> Kirsten: All of this, to me, illustrates how quickly things are moving. I mean, when you really think about it, the whole tokenmaxxxing thing has become a thing, peaked, and now is seen disfavorably, within six months

Pretty sure from inception the phrase “tokenmaxxing” was never seen in a positive light…

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#16

Post by yfontana »

Useful context for this is that token usage keeps rising at an exponential pace. I mean, we don't have numbers for the big labs, but Openrouter's numbers are quite telling (can't post link because corporate decided to block all "non-validated AI tools"), and I think they're probably representative of the global trend. +500% year to date, +50% over the month of May alone. It's unsurprising that providers are struggling to find and pay for the compute.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#17

Post by simianwords »

I think it is easy to make some ragebait doomer articles with eye catching headlines. There are a lot of people who are ready to eat up AI catastrophism because something about apocalyptic predictions and catastrophism seems to attract certain kind of doomer-pilled people.

Here are my concrete predictions

1. Token costs will come down and performance will go up

2. Everyone will spend even more on LLMs not less - the article points at small blips but if anyone thinks it will go down from now, you are mistaken

3. AI Companies will be profitable

If anyone wants to counter bet on me, please go ahead.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#19

Post by lukas221 »

it's simple, how much dollars you get out for every dollar put into tokens

as Jensen said, get ready for $1000 per mil token

those for which this price makes sense will push out those for which it doesn't - to lower models or to local models

but those who want to run local models need to compete for hardware with the data centers, which have strong scale effects thus will always be able to out price local hardware allocations - can already be seen now as hardware makers get out of retail business

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#20

Post by motbus3 »

With no details, a bird told me of a project which estimated using several millions of tokens per day to automate a team work which got laid off. The operation is now a mess, there is no one willing to be considered liable and since the cheap model they used is about to be retired the company is going to see a 4x increase in price at least.

I have the feeling that the age of 'i can't be blamed by AI stuff' will be a "this was the computer guy mistake" for a moment.

PS. I've been using Claude opus 4.8 and it is worse than 4.6 and I will say that even sonnet 4.6 is better. PhD. Level of software and engineering I believe! I know many PhD who never coded or worked anyway

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