AI is getting expensive, and companies need to be rational about it, says Jamie Dimon.
On a CNBC appearance on Wednesday, the JPMorgan CEO said that companies need to be mindful of token spend and its return on investment.
“They all see the costs going up rapidly,” Dimon said. “So, of course, we’re all going to be rational about it like any other resource we use.”
Dimon, who has been leading JPMorgan since 2006, said that the bank considers the value AI adds and negotiates with vendors “all the time.”
Dimon added that companies are already being smart about spending across the AI supply chain.
“I’ve already seen tons of systems. People are going to send queries to the cheapest token, the cheapest thing,” he said. “That’s already happening, and that’s going to happen with power. It’s going to happen with data centers.”
The bank isn’t giving up its data either, he said, addressing a concern executives are increasingly bringing up.
“We are very protective of our data and our IP,” Dimon said. “You should assume that JPMorgan will do everything they can to protect its own data, its own IP, to protect our customers.”
Modelmaxxing all the way
Dimon is the latest business leader calling for companies to be more conservative about their AI spending. Business Insider’s Aditi Bharade and Henry Chandonnet reported on this phenomenon — modelmaxxing, where firms avoid defaulting to the most expensive, powerful frontier model for every task.
As AI expenses soar, businesses are turning away from tokenmaxxing — using tons of AI tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor to boost productivity in a wasteful way.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp is among the strongest critics of tokenmaxxing.
In a CNBC interview earlier this month, Karp said that AI models have been “oversold” and that many US businesses are silently admitting they are paying for tokens that add no value.
“Something has gone completely wrong,” Karp said. “The basic view among enterprises in this country is ‘I’m going to chillax and waste my time with tokens, I’m going to get no value, and they’re going to get my IP,'” he said.
In an interview last month, the Palantir CEO compared the urge to use so much AI to watching pornography.
“Really, we call it the demastibatory, like get off masturbation thing internally,” Karp said. “It’s like people are just sitting there all day, kind of like a porn addiction.”
The CEO of Cerebras Systems, Andrew Feldman, has also used an interesting analogy to call out unnecessary token spend.
At a Bloomberg event last month, he said that the idea of giving employees unlimited tokens was “boneheaded from the get-go.”
“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.”
