The a16z Show · Friday, August 28, 2026
As AI models advance from chatbots to agents and multi-agent systems, the number of tokens required for a single task has increased by orders of magnitude. This escalating consumption, coupled with expanding user bases, fuels the massive demand for AI infrastructure.
“The value of that unit of work keeps increasing. But underneath the covers, the number of tokens that are consumed is going by orders of magnitude.”
“So as we moved from chatbots to reasoning to agents to multi agents, each step has multiplied the number of tokens a single task takes up. Orders of magnitude increase.”