Sam Altman said AI budgeting had recently become a “huge issue” for some companies — and it sent AI bubble watchers and doomers into a frenzy.
During a Tuesday enterprise event, Altman referenced memes like, “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1.”
“That went from, at the beginning of this year, an issue that never came up — people were totally happy with the amount they were spending — to all of a sudden, a huge issue,” Altman said.
The reader response was loud. Some said that it was a warning of dark times or a failure in AI business model. The word “bubble” came up often. Others said it was par for the course, a normal stage as people learn what to actually spend their tokens on after a period of experimentation.
Commentators from Gary Marcus to Michael Burry got involved. Here are some of the most interesting reactions.
Some say it’s a dark warning
Ed Zitron, one of the internet’s foremost AI bubble warners, wrote on X that OpenAI was “absolutely cooked.”
“This is loser language,” Zitron wrote. “You can’t be four years into the bubble saying ‘yeah our customers have a huge issue with how expensive our business is.’ You just raised $122 billion!”
Programmer Eric S. Raymond (often referred to as ESR) agreed that the “bubble is popping.”
“Make no mistake, it’s a hugely useful technology and uptake will continue, even accelerate,” Raymond wrote. “But the overinvestment in datacenters that we’ve been seeing is not sustainable; the business model of the big providers doesn’t work, and is floating on VC money.”
Academic and author Vivek Wadhwa wrote that it seemed like AI researcher Gary Marcus was right: “the AI revenue models are imploding.”
Marcus himself commented that the death of tokenmaxxing was “potentially a very serious issue for all three big IPOs.”
Michael Burry, the “Big Short” investor who’s taken an AI-skeptical turn, also referenced the story on X.
Others say it’s token misuse
As the tokenmaxxing frenzy dies down, some engineers are wondering: are we spending in the right ways? Altman’s comments may be less of a dark warning and more of a rational cost-benefit analysis.
Google software engineer Patrick Toulme commented that “getting value out of agents is still too difficult for most engineers, so they end up just burning tokens.”
“80% of the economic value of LLMs come from 20% of the tokens,” BCA Research’s chief strategist Peter Berezin wrote. “There is a long tail of dubious token usage that can be greatly curtailed without much negative impact on productivity.”
Kun Chen worked at Meta, Microsoft, and Atlassian. He wrote that AI spending was “driven by FOMO,” so some cutback was “inevitable.”
Still, he remained optimistic.
“I’m bullish that real demand will slowly build up again,” Chen wrote.
Duckbill chief cloud economist Corey Quinn took a more ironic approach. He wrote that Altman was starting to realize that OpenAI’s tokens — the tokens he sells — can be expensive.
“Truly the Copernicus of his generation,” Quinn wrote.
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