Altman calls AI tokens ‘fake’ that Nvidia CEO offered to pay engineers beyond salary

Sam Altman calls tokens 'fake from of a business from value point of view'OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI tokens are “fake form of a business”. Speaking with Stripe cofounder John Collison on the Cheeky Pint and Stripe podcast, Sam Altman questioned the way AI companies charge customers for using their models. Altman said customers prefer knowing how many tokens they are paying for, even if the number is artificially increased, rather than receiving a bill based on the work an AI model completes. “Tokens are a kind of fake unit. I mean, they're real in some sense, but they're not a good unit. They're fake from a business value point of view,” Sam Altman said.This stands in contrast to what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this year. Jensen Huang floated AI tokens on top of salary for engineers. “I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive”, Huang said.OpenAI CEO questions the value of tokens as a pricing unitDespite understanding why customers prefer token-based pricing, Altman said he does not consider tokens a good way to measure the actual business value of AI services. "I would rather not make up a fake unit”Sam Altman said customers were uncomfortable with the idea of receiving a bill without knowing exactly what they were paying for. “But the customer response on that is so negative. They're like, 'I need to know what I'm paying for somehow," he said.He added that even when customers were told they might pay more for the same output, they preferred a pricing system based on a consistent number of tokens."I asked a few people, 'Would you rather pay more for the same output, but have it priced in some number of consistent tokens ?' Even if we inflated the tokens, they're like, 'Oh, I'd much rather you inflate the tokens and pay more, because I know there's a real thing there.'Altman said customers worry that a pricing model without a clear unit could leave them paying more over time without understanding why."People don't just want us to give them a price, because they feel like over the long term they're going to get screwed somehow."