Sam Altman: average person may burn 500B tokens a month within six years
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-09-10
Sam Altman laid out the exponential growth of AI token usage: 6.5 years ago the world's top token consumer was a single OpenAI employee at 100K tokens/month; today the worldwide per-capita average is 100K tokens/month while OpenAI's top user runs in the hundreds of billions. He predicts that repeating the curve, in another 6.5 years the average person may use 500B tokens monthly and the leader quadrillions — a framing widely read as justification for massive inference infrastructure buildout.
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