Tokens as credit card rewards, and a 5,000-fold rise in daily token consumption

All right, gentlemen, diving back in. I want to shift our conversation to money and the economy uh and a story that tells us where it's all going.

So this week it was reported out of China that AI tokens are becoming a consumer currency in the People's Republic of China. Banks give them as credit card rewards. China Telecom sells access to 142 AI models like a mobile data plan. Restaurants hand you compute credits after your meal. But here's the number that really woke me up this morning: China's daily AI token consumption, get this, went from a hundred billion in 2024 to 500 trillion by mid of this year. That's a 5,000-fold increase in two and a half years. I guess that happens when intelligence gets too cheap to meter. As we've said, they become loyalty perks, you know, kind of airline miles for thinking.

Uh, Salim, your thoughts on this?

You know, it is um — hold on, my brain is — my — I'm just trying to process the — can I make a comment about our Moonshots day?

Sure.

There is, you know, we've covered in this last few moments — and I think it's really important to point something out. We have this amygdala that's scanning for danger. Therefore, we have this preponderance for focusing on bad news. Right? When you see something new and that you don't understand, you refer — or you reference it as dangerous, and it lights up the amygdala and therefore everybody freaks out.

And our job as a human being in this particular time is, when you see something new, like AI kind of solving major problems, don't relate to it as negative, relate to it as abundance and positive, because that's what it's actually delivering. So my brain is kind of stuck on that model, and I think the positive framing of this — like this is one of those inflection point days, the Moonshot Summit, that people coming in will get their brains trained on positive thinking for the next 10 years.

Rewiring — rewiring your neural net, right, to optimism.

Please come or attend or watch or consume it one way or the other.

Yeah, thank you for that.

So, I'm stuck on that. Go to somebody else.

I think on the China giving out tokens too, I — it dovetails exactly with what you were saying. You need to find like-minded people in America who are trying to ride this wave and not get crushed by it. But I remember when the PC came out, if you're hanging around a high school, a huge fraction of the high schoolers are like, you know what? I'm too cool for that. I'm not going to the computer. I don't care, you know? And then now, where are you? The AI is like that all over again.

And in China, they don't have that problem. Everybody's into it, which is why they're giving away compute credits, you know, with bank accounts and with — but because everyone's like, this is huge and I want to be part of it. In the US, you're going to get a counterculture. You always get a counterculture. And so, if you come to the Moonshot Summit, you're with like-minded people, and you can kind of tune out the counterculture. But it'll be — the counterculture is going to be rampant. It's going to be led by Bernie Sanders probably. It's going to be saying like, I sat it out, I deliberately revolted by not taking part in it. Just ignore the hell out of those people. They will absolutely be roadkill. You don't want to be part of that. You want to be part of this.