AI tokens are on the minds of many CFOs. The president of OpenAI predicts that within a year they will no longer be thinking about them. Bret Taylor, founder of AI startup Sierra and board leader of OpenAI, said many of the “problems” around tokenomics are because the AI market has not yet reached maturity.
AI tokens are on the minds of many CFOs. The president of OpenAI predicts that within a year they will no longer be thinking about them.
Bret Taylor, founder of AI startup Sierra and board leader of OpenAI, said many of the “problems” around tokenomics are because the AI market has not yet reached maturity.
Speaking to CNBC on Monday, Taylor said that over time he hopes other companies will “take on the burden of managing the tokens.”
Tokens are units of text that are processed by AI models and are used to calculate AI usage and cost. Earlier this year, skyrocketing token costs prompted companies to monitor their AI spending and evaluate whether they were getting a return on investment.
“I think the world is moving toward paying for results,” Taylor said, echoing other executives who are now prioritizing return on investment (ROI).
Tokenmaxxing towards token efficiency
Taylor compared the current AI market to the early days of the Internet, when building a website cost much more.
“We’re just in the early stages of the technology and I think it’s a call to business owners to develop solutions so that businesses don’t have to deal with these things,” Taylor said.
He pointed to Ramp’s recently introduced token spending tool, as well as sector-specific AI companies, such as legal startup Harvey, which instead manage tokens for their clients.
“I think moving forward 12 months from now, IT departments will be really sophisticated in terms of industrial applications of AI,” Taylor said. “For your marketing department, you might have one thing. For your software engineers, another.”
“So you don’t need to think about the word token at all,” he added.
Token costs are expected to decrease over time as AI models become more efficient. Kimi K3, a model launched last week by Chinese startup Moonshot, caught the attention of Silicon Valley by rivaling the capabilities of powerful models from OpenAI and Anthropic at a lower cost.
Taylor said he’s still not completely convinced.
“‘Is it cheaper to use?’ is the most important part for anyone considering doing it,” Taylor said. “And I think the jury is out on that.”