Sam Altman says the single heaviest AI user on Earth, 6.5 years back, consumed about as much as the average person does now: "Six and a half years ago, the world token leader was an OpenAI employee using about 100,000 tokens a month." "And this seemed ludicrous at the time. The worldwide average per capita is like zero." "Now, the worldwide average of tokens per month, which I think tokens are the dumbest metric, but it's what we have. It's like 100,000." "And the token leader at OpenAI uses something in the hundreds of billions." "If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, 500 billion tokens a month." If he's right, the typical person's AI use climbs about five-million-fold over that same stretch of time, and OpenAI is already putting the capacity in place. That's the figure company boards should plan around this year. Demand on that scale changes what a sensible AI budget looks like. Sam Altman with Garry Tan at Y Combinator's Startup School 2026. Interested in AI? Follow @SiliconValleyPX and never fall behind. I track ChatGPT, Claude, and how every new agent is changing how we work and think, then hand you the pure signals.