Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

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 class of golf playing NPCs that figured out how to game the system and bring all their cult members along for the ride.

My own company spent 2+ years enforcing extreme austerity, to the point of firing the very people who built everything, only to run wild with AI spending and seeing little results from it.

Surely, out there in the wilderness, there is a company staffed by intelligent, skilled people. Right?

The token consumption concern is real but I think the framing misses a key trend: specialized models for specific domains.

In legal tech, we run domain-specific models for contract review that use 90% fewer tokens than general-purpose LLMs because they understand legal document structure natively. The token cost per document dropped from dollars to cents.

The real "tokenpocalypse" is for use cases that try to do everything with one general model. As the ecosystem matures toward specialized tools (similar to how we got specialized IDEs for different programming languages), token efficiency improves dramatically.

The analogy holds: general-purpose models are like Swiss Army knives — useful but inefficient. Domain-specific models are like proper tools — more expensive upfront but vastly more efficient for their domain.

Even on the consumer side AI providers are enshitifying the plans. Everyone saw this coming three months ago plus.

The corporate side seems to be well... stupid? Execs asking their people to burn tokens do not understand the politics and cadence of business. Corporations do not actually demand more work to be completed in the way we traditionally think. Creating a lot of stuff in a corporation tends to naturally banish most of it to the void because that stuff requires other people to exist and engage with it in order to use it, deploy it, get customers using it, etc. AI does not take up that slack in the way that we are being told because it lacks agency. For most people in corporations the problem is not that they can't do their work, their real jobs are mostly being political nodes in a vast system. There is no solution on the table to change that at all.

Probably the cost model for LLM providers for consumers will be somewhat subsidised by providers basically linking up extremely specific profiles about users and using these to sell products directly in an agentic pipeline which includes agentic commerce. Maybe it's less one click purchases and more one prompt purchases. Of course this stands to be pretty bad for consumers in a lot of ways (deeply invasive marketing, possibly being missold products).

Of course the question remains, who is supposed to be buying products through this system if AI systems continue to displace jobs?

>AI can't easily get away with subsidizing their own product and enshittify later.

They have to do it in reverse order which seems to be maybe impossible. I contend that SOTA models are still quite bad at what their companies claim them to be good at. They remain confidently wrong more often than they should be. The public also is tired of 'slop' and will continue to push back on it.