this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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Ironic
Lol. Lmao even. Rofl perhaps.
But it stops clearly short of roflmao, I infer?
Roflcopter?
Roflcopter?
Hey hey hey hey hey whoa whoa let's just keep the big guns in reserve for now, ok?
Ai bubble burst will be the time.
Too bad it’s going to hurt so many people too
Albuquerque New Mexico...
IYKYK
Albuquerque New Mexico period period period exclamation mark
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Something I’ve been noticing recently is that while the cost per token on specific models hasn’t gone up, the provided interfaces for using those models are starting to chew up significantly larger numbers of tokens for the same tasks that used fewer tokens with older versions of the interface software just a few months ago. Likely the interfaces are applying more expensive guardrail prompts and charging the end user for those tokens — but the end result is that it costs 4x as much to get the same work done.
"Tokens" are just made up.
These "tokens" that are used to "measure" how much you use, they are not a real dimension that can be measured. Just an artificial counter that goes up when they decide that it should go up.
They can change the "size" of a "token" every day, and every second, and every microsecond....
Not entirely wrong, but tokens are not just "fake" in the way, for example, an in-game currency is. They're the fundamental "units" of data, both input and output, processed by the model. For most models, tokens are just a certain number of characters or words. So they're not completely untethered from the model. If we're both using Clankerbot v5.1: Sloppy Logic Edition™️, your tokens are defined in the same way mine are.
This is near the edge of my limited understanding, but AFAIK, yeah they can mess with token costs and billing schemes all they want. They could theoretically charge us 2 different costs per token, or do surge pricing or some shit.
if they wanted to change the actual size/definition of what a token is though, that would require a whole new model (or at least a major revision).
You aren't totally wrong. Such a unit exists and it is also called tokens, that can measure the capability of a model and the size of a running operation in a model.
But what they use for calculating your bill is something different today.
That doesn't make much sense. When Anthropic moved to Sonnet 5 they introduced a new tokenizer which increased token use up to 35%. If these would be unrelated kinds of tokens why would the usage go up when the process of tokenization changes?
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Tokens are well-defined groups of bytes ranged by frequency of occurrence in texts to efficiently translate them into a sequence of 32 or 64-bit binary integers, an LLM-optimised form if compression. They are well-known, you can play with them here: https://gpt-tokenizer.dev/
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My CLAUDE.md file bloated significantly. It tried to load unnecessary skills and would retain throughout the whole session. Fixing that, maintaining good wikis and using clear often really helped fixed my personal token burn.
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How is it too expensive? Surely it's generating way more profit than it would cost in value. How else could it be propping up the entire economy?
Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.
Nah we should just reduce our use because its too expensive and then stop thinking about it beyond that.
Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.
Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.
Luckily, that would never happen...
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That's funny now that whole workflows are automated with it. Oops hit the quota, I'm off
You mean those workflows that could've been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?
Those workflows
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This is actually how the bubble begins to pop, we're seeing it happen now.
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I’m confused. I thought employers loved AI and it was the future.
They loved it too much and now it costs more than paying a living wage to a human being. The end goal of AI was always to cut cost and layoff people. The best sabotage right now is to setup a script that constantly prompts an LLM for something useless. I would recommend it if it didn't waste so much energy and clean water. But it would send a message. AI is not cheaper, it never was. Even with today's outrageous token prices, LLM companies are still bleeding money per user. It will only get more expensive as data center contracts fall through and the investment craze fizzles out.
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They love money. AI was good money for a while. Or at least it looked like good money until you looked at it for longer than 3 seconds, which greatly surpasses the average attention span of an executive. And also the average executive's iq.
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https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
Why use many token when few do trick
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We can only hope this helps kill the fad. I know companies won't be taking any realistic lesson from this, but at least this can force them to abandon a lot of this crap.
I smell a bubble about to burst...
Im drooling over that idea
All over America, employees are saying "But YOU said..."
Uplifting News
So it has a negative ROI and anyone who brought it into their firm is a clueless twat who uncritically bought a sales pitch.
If corporate governance were not a joke, C-level heads would roll.
This is why these companies should go bankrupt.
We had a system that works and they thought if they got rid of the actual workforce with the needed knowledge and replace them with lower paid AI retards it would make them more money, fucking karma.
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The millionaires following the stupidity of billionaires and wondering why they're not becoming billionaires too.
Give them 50 years and maybe they'll start to wonder why people doing "how to get rich" seminars aren't retiring... And why podcasters telling everyone how to get women seem like such losers.
What’s this echoey sound? As if someone warned us about this exact fucking thing.
Curious.
I don't really understand how people are using so many tokens. At work I haven't even hit $200 I spend per month. Wtf are people doing with these things that burns so many tokens?
If you run "agentic coding harness" or any kind of goal oriented loop then tokens goe brrrr.
And LLM sellers are pushing for that (duh), as they managed to convince people to use infinite monkeys typewriting until they make Hamled.
(Type made on purpose)
I do it on purpose
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My company recently converted our PMs into Vine Engineers right after laying off actual engineers. They don't even know what git is or how to use it. 3 of them alone are using $7k a month in Claude tokens and they have not raised so much as a single PR.
Who needs PRs? What's a branch? It defaults to master and that seems to work just fine!
Maybe they should get AI to do the AI prompts so they can cut down on costs XD
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