GeekWire AI summit takeaways: Token budgets, watermelon metrics, and the $5k weekend coder

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Fresh off the big GeekWire AI summit, we unpack what they heard from Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna, OpenAI applications CTO Vijaye Raji, and other speakers at the Agents of Transformation event in Seattle, presented by Accenture.

The big thread: the economics of AI, from token budgets becoming a hiring negotiation point to startups running on subsidized credits that may not last.

Plus, a startup founder whose engineer burned through $5,000 in AI tokens over a single weekend of vibe coding, OpenAI shutting down Sora amid $15 million-a-day processing costs, and why panelist Liat Ben-Zur said the performance indicators many companies are using for AI are “watermelon metrics” — green (profit) on the outside, red (losses) on the inside.

Also: how Todd used a Claude project over several months to prep for the event, John’s experience bouncing between Gemini and ChatGPT, and why the pure chat era may be over. 

And in this week’s trivia: Sound Transit’s light rail starts crossing Lake Washington on a floating bridge — but when did the original I-90 floating bridge open?

Audio editing by Curt Milton.