From Tokenmaxxing to Tokenminning: The Case for Token Engineering

In this episode, Cooper sits down with Neurometric CEO, Rob May, to talk through a big-news month: the show's rebrand from Inference Time Tactics to Token Engineering, the launch of tokenminning.com as a response to the "tokenmaxxing" trend, Neurometric's new token engineering platform and fundraising announcement. But the bigger conversation is about why Rob thinks "token engineering" is about to become a discipline every AI company needs—the same way DevOps or UX became non-negotiable roles—and why he's betting the company on getting there first.

We talked about:

 

• The origin of tokenminning.com—started as an April Fools' joke and Reddit group—and why it caught fire as a real counterpoint to "tokenmaxxing."
• Specialized, fine-tuned models beat frontier models on individual tasks. 
• New token engineering platform unifies fine-tuning, distillation, and caching in one system. 
• COGS vs. OPEX: how Neurometric spots which customers feel AI costs most. 
• Integrating with Harbor to run 15,000 agentic evaluation tasks across models like Gemma, Qwen, Mistral, and Granite.
• Token engineering is becoming a C-suite responsibility, not just an engineering one.

Resources Mentioned:

Tokenminning Manifest: https://www.tokenminning.com/ 

Connect with Neurometric:
Website: https://www.neurometric.ai/ 

Substack: https://neurometric.substack.com/ 

X: https://x.com/neurometricai/ 

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/neurometric.bsky.social

 

Hosts:

Calvin Cooper

https://x.com/cooper_nyc_ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc

 

Rob May

https://x.com/robmay 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay