Markie Wagner, author of the 2023 essay 'Choose Good Quests' and a founder backed by Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Genius Ventures, and OpenAI, is publishing her first written piece in years. The thesis: tokenmaxxing is dead. Fortune 500 CEOs are privately admitting they committed to massive token spend and cannot measure what they got back. Wagner has been hearing this directly from the C-suite, and she is now saying it publicly.
The argument is not that AI is overhyped in aggregate. It is that the current metric, tokens consumed, is the wrong unit of value. Wagner's framing, Return on Tokens, pushes enterprise AI evaluation toward measurable outcomes rather than usage volume. The original piece details how she arrived at this, who she has been talking to, and what a better measurement framework looks like in practice.
Read the full piece for the reasoning behind the framework, not just the conclusion. Wagner's background, growing up inside computing culture in Southern California and spending years building toward this specific problem, shapes an argument that is structural rather than tactical. If she is right, the companies still optimizing for token throughput are building on the wrong foundation.
[READ ORIGINAL →]