Token Naming War: Who is Competing for the "Minting Power" in the AI Era?

Original Author: Kuli, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, you might have noticed something: people have started discussing what Token should be called.

Professor Yang Bin from Tsinghua University published an article with a title that directly states, "Determining the Chinese translation for 'Token' is already extremely urgent"; on Zhihu, related translation questions have garnered 250,000 views, with comment sections full of suggestions.

For the past two or three years, the domestic AI circle directly used the term "Token," and no one saw a problem. Why is a Chinese name suddenly needed?

The immediate reason might be that after this year's Spring Festival, ordinary people learned for the first time that Tokens cost money.

OpenClaw turned AI from chatting to working, with a single task burning through hundreds of thousands of Tokens, sending bills skyrocketing; various cloud providers have also announced price increases, with the billing unit also being Token.

Simultaneously, Token has started appearing where it previously shouldn't.

At the GTC conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that in Silicon Valley, people are already asking in interviews, "How many Tokens does this job offer?" He suggested incorporating Tokens into engineer compensation;

OpenAI founder Sam Altman went even further, suggesting that Tokens will replace universal basic income, with everyone receiving not money, but computing power.

Data from the National Data Bureau shows China's daily Token consumption surged from 100 billion at the beginning of 2024 to over 40 trillion by September 2025, reaching 180 trillion in February this year. At the beginning of the year, *People's Daily* specifically published an article titled "A Casual Talk on 'Ciyuan'" to explain the term to readers.

Once a technical term enters cloud service bills, recruitment compensation packages, and official statistical frameworks, it can no longer continue to be called by its English name.

The question is, what should it be called?

If this were merely a translation issue, an answer already existed. In 2021, the domestic academic community settled on a name for Token: "词元" (Ciyuan).

But no one cared because, back then, Token was just an internal term within the tech circle.

Now it's different.

The word "Token" itself is a universal container. Previously, people in the crypto sphere called it "代币" (token/coin), security folks called it "令牌" (security token), and AI people called it "词元" (lexical unit). The same English word, depending on which direction the Chinese translation leans, determines whose territory it belongs to.

Thus, a battle over naming "Token" has begun.

Business Needs Discourse Power

How a word is translated is usually a matter for linguists. But this time, among those participating in the naming, there are almost no linguists.

Currently, the name with the loudest voice is "智元" (Zhiyuan).

The most vigorous promoter is an AI media outlet called "新智元" (Xin Zhiyuan). If Token's Chinese name is set as "智元," this company's brand name would coincide with a fundamental industry term, meaning every article discussing Token would provide free advertising for it.

Their own promotional article ends with candid wording: "We suggest translating Token as the industry's new consensus: '智元,' leaving the '新' (new) character for us."

According to the same article, Baichuan Intelligence founder Wang Xiaochuan commented: "Calling it '智元' is quite good."

As someone building large models, of course, it's good for him if Token is called "智元." Every computational output from the model would no longer be just a billing unit but a "basic unit of intelligence."

Selling Token is selling traffic; selling "智元" is selling intelligence—completely different valuation stories.

Tsinghua University's Professor Yang Bin proposed "模元" (Moyuan), with "模" corresponding to model. Whoever owns the large model controls the production right of "模元." Leaning the name towards models shifts pricing power towards model companies.

Some advocate for "符元" (Fuyuan), returning to the most fundamental definition in computer science—Token is a unit of symbolic processing, unrelated to intelligence or models.

Technically the cleanest, but the proposer is an independent technical writer, without corporate backing or capital promotion, holding almost no voice in this discussion.

Whichever direction the name leans, the industry narrative moves that way, and money flows in that direction.

A distant example: the day Facebook renamed itself Meta, "metaverse" transformed from a sci-fi concept into a valuation story for a company. A recent example: China consumes 180 trillion Tokens daily, ranking first globally, but what to call this term, how to define it, and who defines it remain undecided...

The world's largest consumer of Tokens hasn't even decided what to call what it consumes.

However, this term actually already had a Chinese name.

In 2021, Professor Qiu Xipeng from Fudan University's School of Computer Science translated Token as "词元" (Ciyuan). The academic community accepted it and wrote it into textbooks. No one discussed it then because Token wasn't valuable back then.

Now Token is valuable.

It's the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue source for large model companies, and a core metric for the state to measure the scale of the AI industry. So, media arrived, big names arrived, professors arrived, each bringing their preferred name and the rationale behind it.

Translation was never the problem. The problem is when this term started becoming valuable.

Jensen Huang didn't participate in the Chinese naming discussion at GTC. He did something simpler: held up a championship belt printed with "Token King," declaring that data centers are Token factories.

Whoever produces Tokens defines Tokens. What the name is, he doesn't care.

Token, Land Grabbing, and Minting

Therefore, what's truly worth serious thought about this matter isn't which translation is better.

After the term "calorie" was established, the entire food industry's pricing, labeling, and regulatory systems were built around it. After the definition of "流量" (data traffic/flow) was established in China's telecommunications industry, operators billed by traffic, competed by traffic, and designed packages by traffic—the entire business model revolved around these two words for over a decade.

Token is now walking the same path.

It's already the billing unit for cloud services, the revenue metric for large model companies, and a core indicator for measuring the AI industry's scale at the national level. The VC circle has even started discussing whether investment disbursements can be made directly in Tokens.

Once a word becomes a measure of money, naming it is no longer translation; it's minting currency.

Call it "智元," and the minting right belongs to the AI narrative; whoever tells the story of intelligence benefits. Call it "模元," and the minting right belongs to model companies; whoever has the large model prints money. Call it "符元," and the minting right returns to the technology itself, but technology itself doesn't speak for itself.

The "词元" settled by academia in 2021 was ignored not because the translation was poor, but because that "coin" wasn't valuable back then.

Now it's valuable, and everyone wants to carve their name on it.