The price of AI is rising and companies need to get smart about it, says Jamie Dimon.
JPMorgan’s CEO said in a CNBC appearance on Wednesday that companies need to be mindful of token spending and their return on investment.
“They all see costs rising rapidly,” Dimon said. “So, of course, like any other resource that we use, we’re all going to be reasonable.”
Dimon, who has led JPMorgan since 2006, said the bank is “constantly” negotiating with vendors to consider the value that AI adds.
Dimon added that companies are already being smart about spending across the AI supply chain.
“I’ve already seen a lot of systems where people will send queries to the cheapest token, the cheapest one,” he said. “It’s already happening, it’s going to happen in power, it’s going to happen in data centers.”
He addressed concerns increasingly raised by bank executives and said the bank was not giving up any data either.
“We fiercely protect our data and intellectual property,” Dimon said. “You should expect JPMorgan to do everything it can to protect its customers, its data, its intellectual property.”
I’m always model maxing
Dimon is the latest business leader to advocate model maxing. The idea is that companies should be more conservative with their AI spending and avoid defaulting to the most expensive and powerful frontier models for every task.
As AI costs rise, companies are starting to move away from token maxing, or using a plethora of AI tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor to increase productivity in a wasteful way.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp is one of the strongest critics of token maxing.
In an interview with CNBC earlier this month, Karp said AI models are “oversold” and is tacitly acknowledging that many U.S. companies are paying for tokens that don’t add any value.
“Something is completely wrong,” Karp said. “The basic mindset of companies in this country is, ‘I’m going to relax and waste my time with a token. I’m not going to get any value and they’re going to take my intellectual property,'” he said.
In an interview last month, Palantir’s CEO compared the urge to use AI heavily to watching porn.
“In fact, we call it de-mastication. It’s like mentally stopping masturbation,” Karp said. “People just sit there all day, it’s like a porn addiction.”
Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras Systems, also uses an interesting analogy to call out unnecessary token spending.
At a Bloomberg event last month, he said the idea of giving employees unlimited tokens was “crazy from the start.”
“You don’t need a Ferrari to go to the grocery store, right? Use a lower-cost open source model,” he said. “What we’re learning is how to shop at Costco.”