Compute Is the New Generation of Free Eggs: When Big Tech Starts “Handing Out Eggs”

Compute / tokens are the new generation of free eggs. Right now all the big vendors are handing out compute like they’re handing out eggs. When you’re old, you’ll be fighting other old grannies and grandpas for free eggs, this is no longer just a joke, it might be reality.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I. First, about the eggs

At the vegetable market entrance, at bank branches, at supplement-lecture events, set up a table, write “free eggs,” and the line can run from before dawn until midday. The elderly don’t really lack those two eggs; what they want is the small reassurance of “it’d be a waste not to take them.”

The people handing out eggs never run out of eggs. The market gives out eggs to lure you inside to buy groceries; the supplement people give out eggs to eventually sell that tens-of-thousands-yuan mattress. The egg is just a better flyer.

By 2025 and 2026, this script has a new protagonist. The ones handing out eggs have become tech companies worth hundreds of billions; the eggs have become tokens and compute.

II. Now, big tech is all setting up tables at the door

• Xiaomi waves its hand and gives away over ten billion tokens, plainly declaring “claim them first, whether you use them or not.”
• DeepSeek has cut API prices to the floor, fighting a “price war” so hard people wonder if it’s doing charity.
• ByteDance’s Doubao keeps cutting; Moonshot AI’s Kimi gives you long text to play with freely.
• Tongyi Qianwen, Wenxin Yiyan, Tencent Yuanbao, iFlytek Spark, among domestic large models, nobody dares to be the first to charge.
• Overseas: OpenAI gives ChatGPT to students, Anthropic runs Claude for Education, Google stuffs Gemini straight into student accounts.
• Cloud vendors are even more direct, register and get compute vouchers; startups open their mouths and say “free quota.”

Big tech all over the world is, in lockstep, setting up tables at the door: free tokens, first come, first served. You think you’re picking up freebies; actually you’re queuing for eggs.

III. Why give out eggs

Giving out eggs was never about the eggs. Big tech giving out tokens is the same:

• Customer acquisition cost approaches zero. The huge training bill was already paid; the marginal cost of serving one more user is nearly zero. Inference compute is cheap enough to scatter like a flyer, so why not?
• Build the habit. Get you to embed it into your workflow so you can’t live without it like water and electricity. Today you get used to it free, tomorrow when the price goes up you can’t leave, and switching costs are the real moat.
• Win the mindshare, win the data. Every prompt you send is feed you’re throwing back to them.
• Lock in the next generation. Students who do homework with free quota today will, when they graduate and enter companies, be the ones who “always use this” in the default selection. Giving eggs to students is buying the default choice of the next generation in advance.

We’ve seen this playbook. Back in the ride-hailing wars and food-delivery wars, subsidies burned harder than anyone, until only two or three were left, and then, you know the rest.

IV. The eggs will eventually run out

The first law of subsidy economics: the wool comes from the sheep, it’s just a matter of time.

Today’s free tokens are written off on investors’ books, written into future price hikes, written into the data account of you being continuously fed. Once only a few players remain at the table, the egg stall closes, the free quota gets cut, the walls go up, and the prices will come back to find you.

And the people who queued for free eggs most happily are often the first to be cut when prices rise.

V. So, “when you’re old, you’ll be fighting for eggs”

Back to the joke at the start. Why do I say that when you’re old, you’ll be fighting elderly grandpas and grannies for free eggs?

Because if compute really becomes the water, electricity, and gas of the next generation, a basic resource that work, healthcare, school, and errands all depend on, then “who can get compute cheaply” becomes a survival problem. At that point, this joke forks into two futures:

• The pessimistic version: compute is rationed eggs. The platforms’ free quotas are the soothing gift given to “digital senior citizens.” You queue, you scramble, you get up at dawn to squat for those few free tokens every day. The compute divide becomes a new form of wealth gap: people who can afford context, and people who grab for free quota, live in two different worlds.
• The optimistic version: eggs are so plentiful they’re worthless. Compute becomes as cheap and as freely available as electricity is today, and nobody needs to grab for it. Just as nobody queues for a kilowatt-hour today.

Interestingly, this very “free egg war” is the same road to both of these futures. Subsidies burn out scale, and scale pushes down costs; if costs are pushed low enough, the eggs either get cheap enough that everyone has them, or get re-priced by a monopolist. Which fork you take doesn’t depend on technology; it depends on how many players are left at the table, and who governs them.

Conclusion

Next time you grab a free token from some large model vendor, don’t just be happy about it. Think of that elderly person clutching an egg at the vegetable market door, what they carried away wasn’t an egg, it was someone else’s carefully designed move.

Our generation spent our youth as “data feed” and “habit samples” for big tech; when we’re old, will we really have to fight for compute handouts? Today that sentence sounds like a joke. But between a joke and a prophecy, there is often only the turn of a “the eggs are all gone.”

Either way, while the eggs are still free, grab a few more.