Sam Altman calls tokens ‘fake from of a business from value point of view’ that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he will offer engineers worth half their salary

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.