Tokens or humans? The new corporate trade-off - CNBC

CFOs have discovered a new way to balance the books: swap warm bodies for increasingly expensive digital tokens. According to CNBC's latest report, each new frontier model release costs roughly twice as much per token as the one it replaced. That's right — the hamster is running faster and eating more, but apparently that's progress. The article frames it as a 'trade-off', which is corporate-speak for 'we need to fire some of you to pay for the AI'.

Artificial intelligence is turning out to be far more expensive than enterprises expected, the report notes. So naturally, CFOs are responding by cutting future headcount. It's the corporate equivalent of buying a Ferrari and firing the chauffeur because you can't afford the petrol. The doubling cost per token — from GPT-3 to GPT-4 to whatever monstrosity emerges next — is a feature, not a bug, they'll tell you. Meanwhile, humans, who presumably don't double in price every year, get the axe. The article quotes executives who frame this as 'efficiency', which in this context means 'we're spending more on AI, so we need to spend less on people'.

The token-human trade-off is the new corporate arithmetic, and the humans are getting subtracted. As one unnamed CFO reportedly put it, we're entering an era where 'tokens are the new headcount'. The irony is that if the AI were truly efficient, it would be getting cheaper, not twice as expensive each release. But why let physics or economics get in the way of a good spreadsheet? The result is a labour market where jobs disappear to pay for increasingly costly digital simulacra. The future is not just expensive; it's twice as expensive every generation — and that's apparently a bargain.