Goldman Delta One head, Rich Privorotsky, on tokenomics "Token economics: Reading that DeepSeek reportedly cut token pricing by 75% and Xiaomi’s MiMo by almost 99% immediately brought back memories of the old Groupon subsidy wars and the inevitable race to the bottom economics of commoditized delivery. There’s also been a massive rise in open-source enthusiasm. I was honestly blown away running an 8B version of Qwen locally on a four-year-old MacBook last night (ok it couldn't do much but it felt downloading the internet in 5gb...18ms ago you would have need a data center for this!). Notably, Chinese onshore datacenter and AI infrastructure names have diverged sharply post release (they all went down). Maybe a bit of a leap here but I think the market is beginning to ask whether token cost compression temporarily breaks the logic of pure Jevons paradox demand expansion. It's not whether demand ultimately rises… it probably does… but whether there is a meaningful lag where cheaper tokens simply cannibalize higher cost inference before entirely new use cases emerge. Nobody is arguing open source models are fully comparable to frontier systems, although the quality gap is clearly narrowing quickly. The more important point is that a huge percentage of enterprise tasks simply do not require frontier level reasoning or expensive inference. That becomes a major boardroom conversation into Q2/Q3. Rationalization of token spend may become just as important as the AI growth narrative itself, particularly when “90% of the output for 10% of the cost” becomes increasingly viable through open source alternatives."(zerohedge)