this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
604 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
86075 readers
2975 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Im self-employed, and my employer has no idea what they'd do with AI, so it's not an issue for me.
I thought a token was a credit for an inquiry, but from reading about this, I'm getting the idea that a token is a word or phrase that forms the prompt for the AI to respond to. So a single prompt could cost multiple tokens if there are multiple words or phrases. Further, since the more parameters you give the AI, the more likely you'll get a decent response, so a good prompt may cost a lot of tokens. Is that correct?
If so, then using more tokens to get a better response is likely to be a more efficient use, than multiple inquiries with mediocre results. But now we seem to be entering a era where they are more focused on the costs than the results, which is always stupid.
For a buncha geniuses, this AI stuff all seems pretty fucked up. Nobody seems to know what they're doing, or even what they want out of it, but they're spending literal fortunes on it. A scenario like that will NEVER have a good outcome.