[neobobkrause]

The compensation debate is interesting but I think it's a sideshow to what's structurally happening here. The entity assigning dollar value to tokens isn't an AI service provider. It's the chip supplier. Nvidia manufactures the hardware that makes AI services possible, and now it's defining the unit of account for the downstream market. Every major AI company is losing money on current pricing. OpenAI is projecting $17B in cash burn this year. The industry needs to transition from subscription pricing to metered, per-token billing, but that only works if the market accepts that tokens have intrinsic value. Jensen putting a $150K price tag on an engineer's annual token budget is an anchoring event for that transition, whether it was designed as one or not. I wrote a longer analysis of how this connects to commodity pricing frameworks and who captures value across the token economy: https://unlockedvalue.substack.com/p/ai-token-economics?r=6g...