🤖 The Controversial AI Productivity Metric

🔋 The Controversial AI Productivity Metric

👟 The Allbirds Pivot Is a Terrible Idea, Right?

📍 6 AI Stock Sectors

🛠️ 5 Trending Tools

🥪 4 Brief Bites

💰 3 Funding Frontlines

💼 4 Job Opportunities

A token is a unit of text, such as a word or part of a word, that language models like ChatGPT process to understand inputs and generate outputs. For example, “carefully” might be broken into three tokens: “care,” “ful,” and “ly.” So, more tokens being utilized means more inputs and outputs being processed.

In Gen Z slang, “-maxxing” means to obsessively optimize a specific trait. In the tech world, “tokenmaxxing” is a new corporate productivity metric that involves monitoring and maximizing how many tokens employees process.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang famously said that he’s actively “trying to” spend at least $2 billion on tokens across all engineering departments. Despite this strong claim, many wonder if it’s an imperfect vanity metric that rewards quantity over quality. In the 1990s, measuring a software engineer’s success by how many lines of code they wrote led to bloated, buggy software.

LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman came out in support of this new corporate productivity metric, arguing that it signals to managers which employees are actually experimenting with language models to adapt to the AI era.

While nearly 48% of companies have adopted AI, more than 21% of U.S. workers report being unaware of their company’s AI adoption, suggesting there’s limited upskilling paired with lackluster leadership. Big Tech’s latest attempt to address this is “tokenmaxxing.”

Allbirds, the once popular shoe brand known for eco-friendly wool sneakers, suddenly decided to rebrand as NewBird AI, strategically pivoting to “GPUaaS”: buying high-end data servers equipped with cutting-edge AI chips and renting out access to them.

This strategic pivot comes just weeks after Allbirds, once valued at more than $4 billion, avoided bankruptcy by agreeing to sell all of its assets to AME for an estimated $39 million.

After the footwear business was sold off to AME, an unnamed institutional investor took over the remaining “public shell” and repurposed it into NewBird AI, backed by a $50 million convertible financing facility: it’s a hybrid investment instrument that starts as debt but converts to equity during a “trigger event,” such as a Series A funding round.

The public listing itself is a valuable asset. Registering a new company for an IPO typically takes about a year of regulatory hurdles. By taking over the remaining “public shell,” NewBird AI is already “born” on the stock exchange, enabling investors to raise capital more easily from the open market.

This isn’t the first time a publicly traded company was leveraged for the value of its “public shell.” In the early days of bitcoin, an iced-tea company called Long Island Iced Tea famously rebranded to Long Blockchain during the crypto craze. It became a classic example of a “public shell” being utilized to ride a hot market.

OpenGradient raised $9.5M to build the compute layer for verifiable AI.

HockeyStack landed $50M to scale revenue agents for the enterprise.

Adcendo closed a $75M Series C for antibody-assisted cancer therapy.

Adobe (San Francisco, CA): Machine Learning Engineer, Summer 2026

NVIDIA (Austin, TX): CAD Engineer, Boost Data Setup, Entry-Level

xAI (Palo Alto, CA): Member of Technical Staff, X Money, Mid-Level

Databricks (London, UK): Sr. Director, Industry Solutions, Senior-Level