Just last month, the most important metric in Silicon Valley was tokens burned—the units of measurement for the computing power being used by AI models. CEOs were giving employees the Matthew McConaughey “ those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up ” speech from The Wolf of Wall Street . Now, they’re asking their staff to pump the brakes. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal , corporate leaders have realized that it actually costs money to burn AI tokens, and doing almost exclusively for the sake of doing it with no other goal in mind is actually not a great business strategy. Good thing these guys get paid tens of millions of dollars a year to figure these things out. Earlier this week, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that it was “ getting harder to justify ” the cost of AI initiatives within the company because the output was not keeping up with the token burn rate, while acknowledging that part of the reason that they went so ham on token burning in the first place is that it “can feel” like AI is free. It’s not, as it turns out. An anonymous AI consultant told Axios that one of its clients accidentally spent half a billion dollars in a single month because it never bothered to put a usage limit on employee access to Anthropic’s Claude. That is… a lot. Like to the point of straining credulity. The Journal didn’t find anything quite that egregious, but did hear about a financial institution that saw its employees burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tokens per month, with employees using premium-tier models to ask basic questions and have inane back-and-forth conversations. That was pretty much always going to be how this very dumb era of justifying AI expenditure was going to go. Corporations have already spent tons of money to embrace these systems, and they need to justify the spend. To do so, they encourage their employees to use it as much as possi
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