Whoever defines a token will have the right to mint coins in the AI era
Author: Curry, Shenchao TechFlow Original title: Token doesn't need a Chinese name, but the business behind it needs one thing you may have noticed recently: everyone is starting to discuss what Token should be called. Professor Yang Bin of Tsinghua University posted an article with the direct title “Determining the Chinese translation of the token is imminent”; 250,000 people viewed the translation questions on Zhihu, and the comments section was full of ideas. In the past two or three years, the domestic AI community directly mentioned the term Token, and no one thought there was a problem. Why do you need a Chinese name all of a sudden? The direct reason is probably that after the Spring Festival this year, ordinary people first learned that tokens cost money. OpenClaw turned AI from chat to work. One task burned hundreds of thousands of tokens, and the bills were booming; various cloud vendors also announced price increases one after another, and the unit of measurement was tokens. Meanwhile, tokens are starting to appear where they shouldn't have appeared before. At the GTC conference, Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon said that someone in Silicon Valley had already asked “how many tokens can be distributed for this job” during an interview, and he suggested including tokens in engineer remuneration; OpenAI founder Sam Altman went further, believing that tokens would replace the basic income of all people, and that everyone received not money, but computing power. According to data from the National Data Bureau, China's average daily token consumption went from 100 billion in early 2024 to surpassing 40 trillion in September 2025, and reached 180 trillion in February this year. “People's Daily” published a special article at the beginning of the year called “Rambling on the Word” to explain the meaning of this term to readers. It's a technical term. Once it's included in cloud service bills, recruitment pay packages, and official statistics, it's impossible to continue to call it English. The question is, what is it called? If this were just a translation question, it would have been answered a long time ago. In 2021, the domestic academic community decided on a name for Token: the word element. But no one cared, because at the time, Token was just an internal term in the tech world. It's not the same now. The term token itself is a universal container. In the past, people in the coin industry called it a token; those involved in security called it a token; those involved in AI called it a token. The same English term belongs to whichever direction the Chinese translation depends on. Thus, a battle for token naming began. Business needs the right to speak. How to translate a word is usually a matter for linguists. However, there were almost no linguists among those involved in the naming this time. Currently, the loudest name is “Ji-won.” One of the AI media called “Xinzhigen” is the one that has been promoted the most. If the Chinese name of Token were to be “Zhiyuan,” the company's brand name would coincide with basic industry terms, which would be equivalent to every article discussing Token helping it advertise for free. At the end of their own promotional post, they wrote very frankly: “We suggest translating Token as the industry's new consensus: Zhiyuan, and leave the word 'new' to us.” According to the same article, Wang Xiaochuan, founder of Baichuan Intelligence, said, “It's nice to be called Zhiyuan.” He made a big model, and of course the Token is called Ji-won. Every time the model is calculated, the output is no longer a billing unit, but a “basic unit of intelligence.” Selling tokens is selling traffic; selling smart yuan is selling intelligence. The valuation story is completely different. Professor Yang Bin of Tsinghua University proposed the “model element”, the corresponding model for the “model”. Whoever owns the big model will control the production rights of the “model element”. The name depends on the model, and the pricing power is in the hands of the model company. There are also people who argue that it is called “Fu Yuan”. Back to the lowest definition in computer science, a token is a symbol processing unit. It has nothing to do with intelligence, and it has nothing to do with models. Technically the cleanest, but the proponent was an independent technical writer. There was no company standing, no capital promotion, and there was almost no voice in this discussion. Whichever direction the name goes, the industry narrative takes, and the money flows in any direction. For example, on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the “metaverse” changed from a sci-fi concept to a company's valuation story; in the most recent example, China consumes 180 trillion tokens every day, the world's first, but what is the name of the term, how to define it, and who defines it is still undecided... The world's largest consumer of tokens didn't even think what to call the things it consumes. However, in fact, this term has been in Chinese for a long time...
