Nikesh Arora (니케시 아로라), CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has drawn attention with remarks that token costs need to fall by as much as 90 percent for AI to become mainstream.
On July 9, on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street", Arora responded to comments by Sam Altman that OpenAI's latest model improved token efficiency in agent coding by 54 percent. "I think 54 percent is a good start," he said. "But it will need another improvement."
He said token efficiency needs to fall by as much as 20 percent within the next 12 months and by 90 percent by the following year.
Rising token costs have emerged as a major burden for companies and a factor squeezing AI budgets. Arora said the current pricing structure is making it increasingly difficult for companies to adopt AI tools and stressed that "AI prices need to come down."
Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp also criticised Anthropic and OpenAI's token billing model and presented open-weight models as an alternative. "I'm not trying to blame them, but something is completely wrong," he said. "U.S. companies are just spending tokens without thinking and wasting time."
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr