🎯 Magnitudes of intelligence

Each order of magnitude in AI usage reveals a fundamentally different phenomenon

This post originally by Azeem Azhar in Exponential View.

“At ten million tokens a day, I began to think of myself as a citizen of a new kind of economy, where intelligence was a utility, not a scarce resource.”

It starts with a couple having a summer picnic, a man lies down to doze as his partner reads in the sun. The camera pulls back, timed perfectly, capturing the scene ten times, a power of ten every ten seconds. Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film captured the park, the city, the continent, the solar system, more.

An image showing the shooting of the iconic film.

Append a zero, and you’d change what kind of thing you were looking at. Scale does that. It isn’t merely more in number, it’s different in essence. When you add another zero, you need to think differently about the thing you once thought you understood.

On 10 February, I consumed 97,045,322 tokens using Anthropic’s Claude API – on my own. A token is the atomic unit of today’s AI; it’s about three-quarters of a word or a tiny bit of a picture, a measure of a chunk of machine-made intelligence. Ninety-seven million is a lot of bits of words.

My token usage just on Claude earlier this week.

Most of us don’t think about token usage. We use our chatbots or coding tools, paying a monthly fee and occasionally hitting a usage cap. If you are using an app your firm built, you’ll likely never think about your tokens.

But, with tokens, as with most things, add another zero, and what you’re observing, or doing… becomes a different thing altogether. And at 97 million, it is a very different thing.