Posted by karakoram 4 days ago
Gary is rich. Let's assume now, he spends between $10-20K/month USD on tokens. Whether he gets overwhelming tangible value out of that token spend is immaterial.
What he's getting out of it is a mix of social signaling value and actual perceived productivity. I don't know, but I doubt he has measuring the ROI on the token investment.
Much like someone gets various kinds of value out of a a personal tutor for their child. Or a high powered executive who continues to request budget for a "Chief of Staff" and related personnel in 2026.
The question is whether this is signal, or noise. Will everyone who has the budget aspire to spend money on tokens as a subtle way of projecting value with some tangible benefit? How long of a runway does this have?
Much like a Chief of Staff office, there's more to manage...but you you get some tangible benefit by having people to whom you can [in theory] delegate tasks and trust they will be completed. To some degree none of this matters, value is in the eye of the beholder.
What a time to be alive. Rich people continue to spend money with abandon, just on different things.
Edit: I work at technology company. If I were spending $10-20K/month USD in tokens I would immediately get flagged by Finance and receive a note from my EVPs Chief of Staff/Business Admin. My usage and prompts would get audited and I would be asked to create a report justifying the business impact of the spend.
Does it matter that he's spending this much money on tokens? What's the derived signal? Why isn't he spending more?! Spend on intelligence seems to have no limit, and he's rich after all right? What's the limiting rate of return on token spend for the rich? Does Gary represent an archetype of other rich people who also want to spend money on tokens at that rate? ...if not more?!
what has he produced with that?
Gary spending 250K/year on nothing is not strongly related to pros using $200/plan to do much better.
He's gonna hit the halting problem
I don't think he has produced anything.
Tokenmaxxing was a dumb trend he has not figured out he's out of the loop yet.
Evaluate the original post and response and build a high level learning plan with citations and references that covers each of the topics in the original post. Start the learning plan with an overview of effective prompting techniques with specific examples to research individual topics.
Large language models are usually priced on MTok or “million tokens”. You’ll often see LLMs priced at $X/MTok for input and $Y/MTok for output.
A harness is a program that interfaces with a large language model and provides it tools and context to achieve a goal. Codex and Claude Code are good examples of harnesses.
What exactly all of this accomplishes is not something I can answer for you :)
Tokens are what you get when you have to map a chunk of text to specific numbers, so that the LLM can actually work with it.
https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Reducetively speaking:
[Your text] --> [List of numbers (tokens)] --> [List of [List of numbers describing a concept/term/thing/job/item/etc] (embedding)]
That final thing (List of embeddings) is what gets fed into the LLM, so that it can produce (List of embeddings most likely to follow afterwards), which is then turned back into text.
> and their worth
Tokens are priced based on the model you're using. In general, expect to pay more when you need to use larger models. (Note: Exceptions exist, but treat them as exceptions)
The space as it is now prices tokens based on:
- how many tokens it needs to process (input),
- how many it needs to generate (output), and
- how often you send the same chunks of text that their system already has on file (cached).
> and harnesses
A harness is something that adds in tools & directions for the LLM, so that it can do its tasks. In a dumbed-down semi-visual summary:
---
[Text about what the LLM should be & what they're allowed/not allowed to do]
[Text about available tools & how to call them]
[Your text here]
---
The harness, if its part of a program/app, then looks at what the models generate in response, and does the (file writing/reading, tool calls, web searches, subagents, etc.), based on the formatted output that the LLMs should produce.
> and what exactly all of those things accomplish
Depends on the goal of the user. Some use them as assistants, most use it for coding.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings?utm_source=share&utm_medium=c...
(Figures vary, see e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christham_4-weeks-on-claude-2... for $13,700/mo.)
If you hit your limits on two Max 20x plans, you could very well be exceeding $300k/yr in token use at current API rates.