The tokenmaxxing hangover

Companies raced to burn AI tokens, rewarding employees for usage and treating consumption as a badge of innovation, and then the bills arrived

Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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Every few months, artificial intelligence invents a new way to make people feel behind.

First came prompt engineering, the art of talking to chatbots just right, which briefly looked like it might become an actual profession. Then came AI slop, the tsunami of generated images and text that flooded the internet until an em-dash use got you called AI. Then came vibe coding, when developers and non-developers alike started describing what they wanted in plain English and letting AI handle the rest, whether or not the result was secure or would hold up under pressure.

The latest was tokenmaxxing. And like the trends that it follows, it may already be over.

For a few months earlier this year, the prevailing philosophy at some of the biggest companies in the world was simple: use as many AI tokens as possible, as fast as possible, and figure out the returns later. Tokens are the basic unit of AI computing,........

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