The Future is Currently Almost Unimaginable and Unintelligible
I don't mean 2050; I mean 2028, and how much AI is going to change everything.
It's not that it's really mysterious or foggy; although it is new and different, it is somewhat mysterious/foggy.
It is just moving so fast, and most of us are completely unaware.
Note that this doesn't mean you cannot get on the right path and be prepared and ahead of your competitors.
Tokens Tell the Story
If you still don't know what tokens are, don't worry. In a year or two, no one will talk about them anymore. (If you really want an explanation, there's one at the bottom of the article. But, when you use electricity at work, you really don't spend time thinking about electrons (I hope).
Electricity: In the 1890s, if you wanted electricity, you needed to know about dynamos, direct vs. alternating current, and voltage drops. Today, you push a plug into a wall. You don't need to know Quantum Mechanics or what a valence electron is to microwave a burrito. Tokens go the same way.
The Proof - Tokens
Think back to ancient times, two, three, or four years ago, when you had never heard of GenAI or Agentic AI. Try to remember the first time you learned what tokens were in the AI world. Seriously, see if you can remember the year and month when you could explain what tokens are. Most people in business still cannot.
OpenRouter, a platform that routes developer API calls across more than 400 AI models, has become a clearinghouse for the global inference market. It tracks tokens.
It now processes 25 trillion tokens per week. Six months earlier, the figure was 5 trillion.
Let me just repeat that in bold: It now processes 25 trillion tokens per week. Six months earlier, the figure was 5 trillion.
500% growth in 6 months. Now 25 trillion - with a T for trillion.
If you set a million dollars on fire every day, it would take you about 70,000 years to burn $25T. So it's quite big.
On May 26, OpenRouter announced a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s investment arm, with NVentures, Nvidia’s venture arm, among the participants. TechCrunch, citing The New York Times, reported a post-money valuation of roughly $1.3 billion.
For something you had not heard about until recently and maybe don't fully understand that is foundational inside the biggest sociotechnological shift in history happening at breakneck speed, that is quite something. You should read that sentence twice.
Hence the title… we have no idea what the leading edge will look like in 2028.
The game is not about trying to guess. The game is to get into the game, start preparing, and be prepared. Find smart /effective friends/help.
This is true at a national, ecosystem, corporate, and individual human level.
Side Bar - Tokens
Tokens are the basic units of text that AI models read and produce—a token can be a whole word, a piece of a word, or a bit of punctuation. Models don't process language as sentences; they break everything into tokens first.
For businesses currently, tokens are the unit you pay in. They determine the cost of every AI request (you're billed per token), the speed of a response (more tokens means more processing), and the limits of what a model can handle in one go (how much it can read and write at a time). Understanding tokens is understanding what drives the price and performance of anything AI-powered your company runs.
p.s. Thanks to Poe Zhao and his smart feed from inside China
