Tokenmaxxing Is Dead. Here’s the Real Cost of the AI Hype Cycle.
For the last two years, tech leaders celebrated engineers who burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in AI tokens, mistaking raw compute consumption for productivity. But as corporate budgets tighten, the performative ‘tokenmaxxing’ trend is collapsing. The AI hype cycle is popping, and the companies that treated token burn as a signal of value are about to learn a brutal lesson in ROI.