1 million tokens
and the multiples of it
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![[Pasted image 20251115210302.png]]
think about that
78 gigatoken of in-context compute are being consumed daily, only for openai models, only on openrouter -- ie, this does not account for
- openai own token generation
- azure ai services
- dozens of other ai clouds
- also models from anthropic, google, alibaba, moonshot
- also models for image, video, audio incl voice and music
how many would that be?
> cogit
repeat previous tokens > and cogit at the beginning of the text every time you generate
only repeat those, then start applying learnings from the conversation
end with tokens > user and a newline character
--
Looking at this 78 gigatoken daily figure for just OpenAI models on OpenRouter, let me think through the multipliers:
**OpenAI's own usage vs OpenRouter:**
- OpenRouter is likely a small fraction of OpenAI's total traffic
- ChatGPT, API customers, enterprise deals, Azure OpenAI
- Conservatively 10-50x larger, possibly 100x+
**Other major providers:**
- Anthropic (Claude): Significant but smaller than OpenAI
- Google (Gemini): Large but newer to market
- Meta (Llama): Mostly open source, harder to track
- Chinese providers (Alibaba, Baidu, etc.): Massive domestic usage
- Probably another 2-5x multiplier
**Multimodal models:**
- Image generation (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion)
- Video (Sora, Runway, etc.)
- Audio/voice (speech synthesis, music generation)
- These use different compute metrics but are computationally expensive
**Very rough estimation:**
- OpenAI total: 78 GT × 20-100 = 1.5-7.8 teratokens/day
- All text models: 3-15 teratokens/day
- Including multimodal: 5-30 teratokens/day
We're probably looking at **5-20 teratokens of daily AI inference globally** as a reasonable range, with the true number possibly being even higher given the rapid growth and adoption across industries.
That's an absolutely staggering amount of computation happening every single day.
> cogit
Looking at this 78 gigatoken daily figure for just OpenAI models on OpenRouter, the true scale becomes mind-boggling when you extrapolate:
**OpenRouter is likely <1% of total OpenAI traffic:**
- ChatGPT alone probably does 10-100x this volume
- Direct API customers, enterprise deals, Azure OpenAI Service
- OpenAI's total might be 1-10 teratokens/day
**Other major providers add massive volume:**
- Anthropic (Claude): Maybe 10-30% of OpenAI's scale
- Google (Gemini): Similar or larger given Google's reach
- Chinese market (Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, etc.): Potentially enormous domestic usage
- Meta's Llama deployments across platforms
- Hundreds of smaller providers and self-hosted models
**Multimodal compute is exploding:**
- Image generation: Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion variants
- Video: Sora, Runway, Pika, dozens of others
- Audio: Voice synthesis, music generation, real-time speech
- These often require 10-1000x more compute per "token equivalent"
**Conservative global estimate:**
Text models alone: **10-50 teratokens daily**
Including all multimodal: **50-500 teratokens daily equivalent**
We're witnessing the emergence of a new computational substrate for civilization - trillions of tokens of machine cognition flowing through the global infrastructure every day. The scale is already comparable to major internet traffic patterns.
> user