{"id":706146,"date":"2026-05-31T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/706146\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T11:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:00:13","slug":"companies-are-getting-burned-by-burning-tons-of-tokens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/706146\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies Are Getting Burned by Burning Tons of Tokens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just last month, the most important metric in Silicon Valley was tokens burned\u2014the units of measurement for the computing power being used by AI models. CEOs were giving employees the Matthew McConaughey \u201cthose are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up<\/a>\u201d speech from\u00a0The Wolf of Wall Street. Now, they\u2019re asking their staff to pump the brakes.<\/p>\n

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that it was \u201cgetting harder to justify<\/a>\u201d 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 \u201ccan feel\u201d like AI is free.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not, as it turns out.<\/p>\n

An anonymous AI consultant told Axios that one of its clients accidentally spent half a billion dollars<\/a> in a single month because it never bothered to put a usage limit on employee access to Anthropic\u2019s Claude. That is\u2026 a lot. Like to the point of straining credulity. The Journal didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 possible. In turn, the employees do\u2014even when there is no point in using AI for a task.<\/p>\n

Meta killed its token-burning leaderboard<\/a> last month after it leaked, revealing that the top \u201cToken Legend\u201d managed to burn 281 billion tokens in a month\u2014more than the amount of compute it would take to reproduce the entirety of Wikipedia 33 times over. Amazon joined in that rollback this week, according to the Financial Times<\/a>, axing its scoreboard of employees who were using the company\u2019s internal AI tools the most\u2014a decision that reportedly was made after it became obvious that employees were giving AI agents pointless tasks just to hold their position on the leaderboard.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear the corporate world is willing to frivolously light money on fire in an effort to justify their existing cash burn pits. Turns out they do have limits, though. You can only use \u201ctokens burned\u201d as a metric at so many quarterly earnings calls before shareholders start to wonder what the price tag of all those tokens adds up to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just last month, the most important metric in Silicon Valley was tokens burned\u2014the units of measurement for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,21859,2574,254,255,64,63,105,174451],"class_list":["post-706146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-models","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology","tag-tokens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}