Hey, it's the thing I said was going to happen. Thank's for taking my suggestion, Sam.

The desperation is strong in this one

Sounds like they have an oversupply of these tokens.

It's only a token offer... I'll see myself out.

Adding more layers to circular investments.

If that's in API price, they may be better of with the subscription.

so weve officially reached the gambling sddiction portion of the LLM show. good luck FOMO

Maybe they can borrow a few OpenAI engineers too?

I thought code was free now

Good ideas are expensive. Which is why he's blanket investing, to catch the winners.

But why would they agree? Coding is free (or at least $200 a month)

What a great way to boost usage before an IPO. Definitely not scammy behavior!

The first taste is free, with a certain perspective on equity

Isn’t that a taxable gift, i.e. reportable income for the recipient, given the normal price charged for said tokens, though?

I have no idea, just a BigCo engineer! Like someone getting hooked... that seems to be a problem for later. Sounds less like a 'mic drop' and more like something else hitting the table. Anyway.

Say 'Whizbang Model 6.8' comes out and tokens burn ~5x faster; what to do? Agree to give up less of the business or hope for proportional growth? The two million that had been agreed is no longer truly available/applicable. How this and the equity 'shake out' are probably relevant.

At risk of upsetting people, token value is arbitrary. What model, what time of day? What transaction? All to say: I have no idea what the Tax Man or our fake business would want :) Above my pay grade, thankfully!

No, because it's an investment for equity

It's just a little casual grooming for customers to prey on, is all.

the tokens are real electricity and capacity.

in ~3 years that equity may be worthless.

> i am excited to see what will happen with tokenmaxxing startups, both for how they work internally and the products they can build.

Am I the only one who gets a physical, visceral churning in their gut when they read/hear someone unironically using the term "tokenmaxxing"?

This is the absolute worst timeline, and I'm embarrassed to even be in an industry adjacent to these dorks.

This is not in defense of tokenmaxxing, I just want to remind that CompSci has already been full of ridiculous names that we all just got used to.

Bogo sort, Canary, and Rubber-Ducking come to mind

Even BASH comes from 'Borne Again SHell', since they re-did what Stephen Bourne made, and it sounds like 'Born Again'

10 years ago i'd never had imagined i'd be using the word 'kubernetes' or 'kube' on the regular

at least tokenmaxxing has a straightforward implication, and the maxxing implies idiocy or excess

> Bogo sort, Canary, and Rubber-Ducking come to mind

None of those come from such a deep hell as the "looksmaxxing" community.

This sounds like how you get (or at least used to get) free AWS and Azure credits in your first x years as a startup or until you met revenue thresholds. You wouldn't get as many, but, you didn't have to give up a share of your company, to my knowledge.

Were there actually larger credit grants that would've been in exchange for equity, or, is OpenAI doing something novel?

Very odd shadow economy that is in the making here.

Like sci-fi with currency based in kwh or life minutes but this time it's tokens

Reminder that "$2 million worth of OpenAI tokens" is meaningless and codes for "as much access to OpenAI infrastructure as Sam Altman feels like letting you have".

It could be at cost, but probably not

Is the "mic drop" in the headline refering to how bad a deal this is for any startup that takes it?

Is the term "tokenmaxxing" now really used unironically and as a desirable thing?

No thanks

> $2M in OpenAI tokens

How about real money or even Apple Gift cards?