Brian Armstrong outlined how he's planning to keep AI spending at Coinbase low.
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Coinbase's CEO wants his engineers to keep tokenmaxxing — while keeping AI costs down.In an X post on Friday, CEO Brian Armstrong outlined five ways in which the crypto exchange is keeping AI costs low.The first of his five strategies was selecting better default LLMs — the models most engineers use by default when submitting prompts. He said Coinbase was experimenting with Chinese LLMs as defaults, which are significantly cheaper than models from frontier American AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI."We're experimenting with defaulting to open weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task," Armstrong wrote.GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 are models developed by the Chinese AI labs Z.ai and Moonshot AI, respectively.His second strategy, one he had spoken about earlier in June, is routing prompts to their most appropriate models based on their difficulty levels."For instance, you may want a frontier model for planning, but not for execution where they can be overkill," he wrote. "Ultimately, humans shouldn't be choosing models - AI can automate this task."
