Uber reportedly exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in just 4 months💸.

A full year's AI budget.
Gone in just a few months.

AI isn't getting more expensive.
We're just asking it to do more.

Longer prompts.
More context.
More agents.
More reasoning.

It reminds me of the early cloud days.
Storage was cheap.
Until nobody cleaned it up.
Compute was cheap.
Until everyone left servers running.

Now we're making the same mistake.
Only with tokens.

The instinct is always to add (+).
More context.
More documents.
More instructions.

But the next competitive advantage won't be building smarter AI.
It'll be building leaner AI.

Giving models exactly what they need.
Nothing more.

Because token optimization isn't just about saving money.
It's about removing noise.
More signal.
Better outcomes.

The companies that master token efficiency won't just have lower AI bills.
They'll build AI that actually scales⚡.… more