Sam Altman calls tokens ‘fake from of a business from value point of view’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI tokens are “fake form of a business”. Altman said customers prefer knowing how many tokens they are paying for, even if the number is artificially increased, rather than receiving a bill based on the work an AI model completes. They’re fake from a business value point of view,” Sam Altman said. This stands in contrast to what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this year. “I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens … because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive”, Huang said.
Speaking with Stripe cofounder John Collison on the Cheeky Pint and Stripe podcast, Sam Altman questioned the way AI companies charge customers for using their models. “Tokens are a kind of fake unit. I mean, they’re real in some sense, but they’re not a good unit. Jensen Huang floated AI tokens on top of salary for engineers.