How bizarre. That's actually a thing. I've read the following quote in another article about tokenmaxxing:

"Scaling compute along with data can increase the size, complexity and therefore value of the result," said Brian Verkley, director of AI data strategy at VAST Data. "A token represents generated business value. Therefore, I expect business value per token to continue to rise, along with AI usage."

WTF, dude. Size and complexity does not equal value. You can shit out a massive dump of unmaintainable garbage code that has zero value. Incentivising your devs to like that will only produce exactly that, a massive amount of garbage.

And using a token only represents immediate business value for the providers of the AI, not for the consumer of the token. If the price payed for the token isn't covering the costs then it's not even a lot of value for the AI provider, apart from usage stats.

This is a doomsday cult.