More Tales From Nvidia: Tokens and Erratum (Issue #230!)
This chart is pretty good on tokens:
https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month
A few observations:
* Looking at the chart, token UNITS interestingly seem to be really flattening overall.
* Re chart later in this note, token pricing is cratering. In part because unit growth is slowing, in part because the current pricing is dis-economic for customers, and in part because open source guys can do it more cheaply anyway and they have a big price umbrella to undercut.
* Therefore, flattening units plus price dropping should equal industry total revenue being down. Not much of a growth industry it would seem. And it is without economics on top of it all. Never realized no growth commodity industries command these valuations.
* Then if you scroll down to the LLM leaderboard section and hit “show more” it appears units for the OpenAI and Anthropic models are now negative. That is units alone.
* The chart shows that OpenAI and Anthropic are share losers to everything else.
* Yet OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be the bulk of promised business for the U.S. infrastructure side of things (MSFT, AMZN, CRWV, GOOGL, ORCL, and on and on and on) while seemingly not having the money to meet these commitments and seemingly losing share and being in an industry that is bereft of economics, use cases, and might not even be growing anymore.
(MSFT intelligent cloud biz is growing all of 8% ex Open AI)
This:
China’s AI Knife Fight: DeepSeek’s New Model Runs 100x Cheaper Than Anthropic’s Flagship
Of course token prices drop every day now, even before this new Deepseek model, which is just going to accelerate the problem.
Relatedly, token prices started crashing end of May, and that did not cause boy genius Leopold to change his thinking or modify his book one bit, nor did it cause his investors to try and redeem. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, and it seems like the hogs are feeding at the trough once again. Stock prices must be inversely correlated to economics, I guess.
Now see whole pic scroll through to bottom half too, can’t wait to get my copy of the book. Maybe instead of opening my own Only Fans account I will do this instead!
Maybe next Wall Street will roll these up into a CDO with an insurance wrapper on it, and sell em off to retail?
Or some enterprising individual will set up an online market for these loans, where you can buy your own little sleeve?
Or they can be pawned off to Klarna, and you can pay for your GPU and burrito at a later date?
The possibilities are endless!
Position: None
BY Doug Kass · Aug 4, 2026, 9:35 AM EDT
