Zhou Hongyi: Tokens will never be like mobile data plans with unlimited monthly usage.

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, interpreted the recent “lobster craze” (OpenClaw intelligence) at the Global Unicorn Enterprise Conference. Regarding the question of when tokens can be as accessible and affordable to ordinary people as mobile data, Zhou Hongyi stated: The core of traditional internet is traffic, and its infrastructure (such as fiber optics) has nearly unlimited capacity; user traffic usage is only proportional to duration and volume. The more users on the platform, the lower the marginal cost. But AI is completely different.

The essence of AI operation is the consumption of computing power, information processing, and “intellectual cost,” adhering to the logic of conservation of information and energy: the more complex the task and the deeper the demand, the higher the consumption of computing power and resources will inevitably be. It is impossible to achieve highly complex work with extremely low investment. Tokens are the measurement units for the intellectual and computational consumption of artificial intelligence, with a relatively fixed unit price; the more they are used, the higher the cost. Therefore, tokens can never achieve unlimited monthly usage like mobile data. (Jin Shi)