so apparently companies are quietly walking back on “tokenmaxxing”. the practice of just throwing insane context windows and max tokens at every problem because, well, they could. turns out it costs a fortune and users don’t actually need 200k tokens to summarise a pdf. which makes me think… if the core monetisation strategy was basically “charge per token, make the model use as many tokens as possible”, and now that’s being dialled back… what exactly is holding up a ~$900bn openai valuation or anthropic creeping toward $1t? like these are genuinely impressive companies building genuinely impressive tech. but the moment efficiency becomes the goal instead of consumption, the revenue math gets a lot harder to justify. you’re not selling compute anymore, you’re selling answers. and answers are getting cheaper every 6 months. feels less like google in 2004 and more like a really smart utility that the market is pricing like it’s the internet itself. not saying it crashes. just saying the multiple probably shouldn’t survive contact with commoditisation. curious if anyone else thinks the tokenmaxxing era quietly dying is a bigger signal than people are treating it. submitted by /u/irelatetolevin
Originally posted by u/irelatetolevin on r/ClaudeCode