alt Hacker NewsThe world is using 300T token a day. Barely anyone is using AI. This number would grow 30x. If there is anything, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic are undervalued by a great deal.
Replies
Cost per token is going to tank; it's a race to the bottom. The frontier model providers have no moat between each other and eventually even the open weight models will be "good enough" for almost every purpose.
Right now the market is expecting something a lot more than "sells a lot of tokens" out of these things to justify their valuation.
There’s no business in tokens. Zero. The only business is selling compute and Anthropic rented all its compute.
Structurally they’re in a terrible position on what’s unfolding now with the completely collapse of model valuations. With truly “open” models gaining more and more momentum models are basically worth nothing and “token” prices are collapsing to the cost of compute. That doesn’t leave anything on the table for the Anthropic and Open AI’s of the world.
Everyone I know and their mom is using AI, technical or not. The question is, is it profitable to run a frontier AI lab and sell inference while spending billions on R&D.
Anthropic could be super profitable right now if they stopped developing new models. But then they'd quickly fall behind because there's not much of a moat. Maybe the only ones who will survive this are huge companies like Google with separate incomes who can swallow the cost of staying on top.
CFOs looking at tons of 2026 token spend but with no clear ROI have joined chat.
I saw a (highly reputable of course) tweet a few days back suggesting all of OpenRouter's DS4 traffic would fit on a single rack of modern Nvidia kit.
If models got smarter and an average prompt response used let's say 5k tokens instead of 10k tokens, would that change your prediction?
Point is, the number of tokens is a silly metric to proxy these companies' growth.
high token usage but where is the value? How come the other s&p companies aren't killing it?
And price could drop 100x.
Yeah, nobody is doubting that people want to consume tokens. We're doubting that that Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic has a significant enough moat to keep people buying their tokens there. Over the past couple years the moat has been the model. As open models are getting better, that moat is drying up. Eventually the market for "tokens" will converge with the market for compute, which is a commodity with little to no moat.