AI tokens could become the kilowatt-hour of the AI age

NPR Planet Money LISTEN & FOLLOW NPR App Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music iHeart Radio YouTube Music RSS link Planet Money AI tokens could become the kilowatt-hour of the AI age July 28, 20266:30 AM ET Greg Rosalsky Wanan Yossingkum/Getty Images Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared, "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Many other AI companies seem to be betting on a similar future. If that vision actually comes to be, then "AI tokens" may break out of the world of nerdy tech and econ conversations and become a much more familiar part of our lives. The number of AI tokens businesses and consumers use could even become one of the defining measures of a new industrial age — the AI equivalent of the kilowatt-hour for electricity: the standard way we measure and pay for AI usage. Sponsor Message Think of tokens as the meter running in the background every time you use AI. Every time an AI model reads your prompt, writes an answer, or does a task, that work is measured in tokens. They are the tiny chunks of text and other data that AI models read and generate. In general, the more work a model does, the more tokens it typically processes. While AI companies still tend to offer flat-rate subscriptions to average consumers, they're increasingly charging businesses and developers based on the number of tokens they use. At the same time, companies, particularly in the tech sector, have been using AI in more and more of their work. As their AI usage has soared, many businesses have discovered just how expensive token-based pricing can become. After a period when tech workers were engaged in a kind of AI free-for-all — which some dubbed "tokenmaxxing" — companies like Uber and Amazon have been putting guardrails around AI use and reducing their soaring token bills (which one clever writer at The Information recently dubbed "tokenminimizing"). But tokens aren't just the way AI companie...