Y Combinator CEO has a message for founders worried about burning AI tokens
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is encouraging startup founders to aggressively spend on AI token usage to maximize the capabilities of AI agents. He argues that high spending now allows companies to experiment with advanced workflows that will become standard in the future.
Why it matters
This perspective challenges the prevailing 'token-saving' mindset in Silicon Valley, potentially accelerating the adoption of AI-driven automation in business operations.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has a message for founders and CEOs concerned about the cost of using large numbers of AI tokens: “Burn, baby, burn.” Speaking on an episode of the A16z podcast this week, Tan argued that founders should spend heavily on AI agents, even when doing so can result in high annual costs.Tan said founders should give themselves permission to use large token budgets when working with AI agents, arguing that doing so can provide access to a level of AI capability that he believes will otherwise become available only in the future.“You have to tune it all the way up. You're just, like, let me load a million tokens or 800,000 tokens in,” he said about using AI agents.
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