The Free AI Token Lunch Is Over. Right-Size Models to the Task
Plummeting token prices never cut AI budgets; they let teams burn more. Because modern models ship with reasoning on by default, "thinking" eats many times more tokens before the answer arrives — a textbook Jevons paradox. AI spend keeps climbing even as cost per million tokens falls, so marketers should match model size to task complexity and price on cost-per-correct-answer, not raw token rates.