The viability of the circular economics of the AI world has long been debated, but most discussions are about the movement of cash within the industry. Slowly but steadily, though, reports are coming in from executives, such as an Nvidia executive and Uber's CTO, that they are starting to realize that the price of tokens may well outweigh that of plain ol' human brain cells. In the face of mass layoffs to make room for AI agents, that fact is seemingly so ironic that Alanis Morrisette is probably writing a song about it.

There are all sorts of enterprise pricing arrangements for LLMs, but for most standard users, the price of a standard AI assistant is $20 a month for a standard plan, and $200 for the pricier, fully-featured version. Token-based pricing is where the real spend is, usually in the form of coding assistants like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot, as well as automation agents with planned tasks of varying complexity that usually run repeatedly on a schedule.

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And yet, the popular sentiment of "I told you so" may be partially misguided. Many CEOs see these bills as a good thing, as it means that their employees are making progress on large-scale automation — in short, driving innovation, at least supposedly.

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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.