Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency \u2013 one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent.<\/p>\n
Yet, as he noted, that staggering volume \u201cdoesn\u2019t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department\u201d.<\/p>\n
That currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsing AI has become part of almost every task now,\u201d said the employee, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised by the company to speak to the media.<\/p>\n
A token \u2013 dubbed ciyuan in mainland China \u2013 is the basic unit through which AI services are measured and billed. Every prompt submitted to a model and every response generated consumes tokens, much like electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours.<\/p>\n
As Chinese tech giants from ByteDance to Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings rush to encourage staff to integrate AI into daily workflows, tokens have become a new kind of corporate allowance. Employees are no longer just budgeting their time; they are also expected to budget their token use as proof of their AI literacy.<\/p>\n
This surge in AI use in the corporate sector is being fuelled by a brutal price war. When Hangzhou-based AI unicorn DeepSeek slashed the price of its flagship V4-Pro model by 75 per cent in May, it highlighted the defining feature of China\u2019s AI industry: an accelerating race to make intelligence cheap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,2477,53,25,2699,6657,387,56741,6010,4395,6726,933,1123,56740,58,3571,16336],"class_list":["post-110222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-alibaba","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-beijing","tag-bytedance","tag-china","tag-china-telecom","tag-deepseek","tag-financial-times","tag-hangzhou","tag-huawei-technologies","tag-meta-platforms","tag-national-data-administration","tag-nvidia","tag-peking-university","tag-tencent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}