Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency – one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent. Yet, as he noted, that staggering volume “doesn’t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department”. That currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens. “Using AI has become part of almost every task now,” said the employee, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised by the company to speak to...
Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services. “The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token economy is emerging,” Yin Hao, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on Wednesday...