Sam Altman says of AI token pricing: "I would rather not make up a fake unit"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking with Stripe cofounder John Collison on a podcast, questioned pricing AI services by tokens, saying the metric does not give a sound way to judge what a service is worth. He said customers still favor token-based charges because they want a concrete quantity to monitor; they would accept paying more when the token count rises rather than charges calculated from what a model does. Altman added that customers dislike pricing without a defined measure because they worry about costs becoming hard to understand later. His comments contrast with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s earlier suggestion that engineers receive tokens on top of base pay, which he said would make them more productive. The discussion concerns how AI companies bill users and how token use is valued.