Chamath warns AI 'tokenmaxxing' will blindside CFOs at earnings

Chamath Palihapitiya said businesses encouraging employees to consume more AI could face surprise operating expenses and even earnings misses, arguing CEOs and CFOs "have no idea how much tokenmaxxing is going on" inside their organizations. He said cheaper models are "80-95% as good" as premium ones from OpenAI and Anthropic, narrowing the quality gap. The warning echoes a broader reckoning over runaway AI costs. A Meta executive said a strong engineer's token burn rate could soon match their salary, likely forcing per-engineer caps, and 1Password launched an AI spend-management tool betting token costs are the next enterprise budget crisis.

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