Wall Street is getting increasingly concerned that the current AI mania will burst and bring the entire market down with it. Silicon Valley brushes that concern off, and VCs and big tech companies continue to pour money into AI in search of big payoffs.
So who is right?
At times like this, I like to turn to the data and ignore the prognosticators.
Evan O'Donnell is a VC and blogger who took it upon himself to build a model that looks at the rate of growth of inference token usage and compares that to infrastructure investment and comes up with some answers. This post details that approach.
But what I like most is Evan's dashboard, which you can see here.
My only critique of this approach is that the data is not real-time. Not even close. When I asked Evan about that via email this past weekend, he said:
No material update on the token numbers.
As of Sept/Oct, token consumption is growing at ~13% monthly across providers (down from 30-40% earlier this year). I'm tracking everything here, under the Reported Token Growth table.
The big players only report these figures at earnings, so likely no major updates until Q1. Google’s next call (Feb) should be the best pulse... they've been consistent in reporting and represent a big share of the market (especially this quarter with the new Gemini release).
For a near-real-time pulse, the best proxy I've found is OpenRouter's weekly usage chart. In the last couple weeks, growth looks steady (in line with the Sept/Oct numbers). Just keep in mind it's tracking a thin slice of the market (1-2%). Directionally helpful, but not something I'd trade off of.
So where does this leave us?
The current infrastructure spend rates are justified if the current rate of AI usage continues. If the growth rates start to decline, there could be trouble.
So we should all be watching the numbers when they come in over the next quarter.
Until then the debate will rage on.
One of my favorite quotes, courtesy of William Gibson, is:
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed
That's how it is with self-driving vehicles. They have arrived. But not everyone knows it.
I was thinking about that at dinner last night while talking to a longtime friend who had just bought an EV and was telling me how much he loves it. And I said, "But it can't drive itself." And he looked at me like I was joking.
I wasn't.
This year, 2025, has been a self-driving journey for the Gotham Gal and me. During our winter stay in Los Angeles, we started taking Waymos over Ubers. We became so comfortable in a car without a driver that we massively preferred it.
When we got back to NYC, we missed Waymos. Eventually, we got a new Tesla Model Y with the latest self-driving hardware and software in it, and now it drives us around NYC. One of us has to sit in the driver's seat, unfortunately, but otherwise it is a very similar experience.
My colleague Nikhil posted this on his return from SF to NYC last week:
every time I come off a week of taking waymos in SF:
1. it feels increasingly strange to return to a non-autonomous city (just as it felt weird to be in cities that didn't have uber yet in 2014-2016)
2. I come away feeling like we continue to under-discuss the second order effects of self-driving inevitability + ubiquity
I think the indifference in the air is largely a function of how gradual (relatively) the rollout of AVs has been and will continue to be
NYC is a tough place to drive in. There are pedestrians and bikes and scooters coming at you from every direction. When you make turns, you have to look everywhere to make sure you aren't going to hit someone. I can't look behind me. But my car can. And so I have found that our self-driving car is able to navigate the crowded and chaotic streets of NYC so much better than we can and almost certainly better than any human can.
As many of you know, I dropped a writer coin, $AVC, yesterday and wrote about it after the fact. Now that it is out there, I feel like I need to invest in it. So I think you can expect me to post more in the coming weeks and months.
The "market cap" of $AVC is about $2mm as of this morning. What that means is the current token price of $0.002 times the 1bn fully diluted number of $AVC tokens equals $2mm. I don't have all of those tokens and neither does anyone else.
Right now, I have vested into about $10k of $AVC tokens. I received an allocation of 50% of all of the $AVC coins and I will vest into them monthly over three years so if the price hangs in there, I could own $1mm of $AVC in three years. That's pretty cool.
What's also cool is many of my readers, subscribers, and Farcaster followers, also got $AVC in the airdop yesterday and they could earn real value if $AVC increases over time. This is how the airdrop was set up on Paragraph (the numbers in this image are fake, mine were very different).
Wall Street is getting increasingly concerned that the current AI mania will burst and bring the entire market down with it. Silicon Valley brushes that concern off, and VCs and big tech companies continue to pour money into AI in search of big payoffs.
So who is right?
At times like this, I like to turn to the data and ignore the prognosticators.
Evan O'Donnell is a VC and blogger who took it upon himself to build a model that looks at the rate of growth of inference token usage and compares that to infrastructure investment and comes up with some answers. This post details that approach.
But what I like most is Evan's dashboard, which you can see here.
My only critique of this approach is that the data is not real-time. Not even close. When I asked Evan about that via email this past weekend, he said:
No material update on the token numbers.
As of Sept/Oct, token consumption is growing at ~13% monthly across providers (down from 30-40% earlier this year). I'm tracking everything here, under the Reported Token Growth table.
The big players only report these figures at earnings, so likely no major updates until Q1. Google’s next call (Feb) should be the best pulse... they've been consistent in reporting and represent a big share of the market (especially this quarter with the new Gemini release).
For a near-real-time pulse, the best proxy I've found is OpenRouter's weekly usage chart. In the last couple weeks, growth looks steady (in line with the Sept/Oct numbers). Just keep in mind it's tracking a thin slice of the market (1-2%). Directionally helpful, but not something I'd trade off of.
So where does this leave us?
The current infrastructure spend rates are justified if the current rate of AI usage continues. If the growth rates start to decline, there could be trouble.
So we should all be watching the numbers when they come in over the next quarter.
Until then the debate will rage on.
One of my favorite quotes, courtesy of William Gibson, is:
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed
That's how it is with self-driving vehicles. They have arrived. But not everyone knows it.
I was thinking about that at dinner last night while talking to a longtime friend who had just bought an EV and was telling me how much he loves it. And I said, "But it can't drive itself." And he looked at me like I was joking.
I wasn't.
This year, 2025, has been a self-driving journey for the Gotham Gal and me. During our winter stay in Los Angeles, we started taking Waymos over Ubers. We became so comfortable in a car without a driver that we massively preferred it.
When we got back to NYC, we missed Waymos. Eventually, we got a new Tesla Model Y with the latest self-driving hardware and software in it, and now it drives us around NYC. One of us has to sit in the driver's seat, unfortunately, but otherwise it is a very similar experience.
My colleague Nikhil posted this on his return from SF to NYC last week:
every time I come off a week of taking waymos in SF:
1. it feels increasingly strange to return to a non-autonomous city (just as it felt weird to be in cities that didn't have uber yet in 2014-2016)
2. I come away feeling like we continue to under-discuss the second order effects of self-driving inevitability + ubiquity
I think the indifference in the air is largely a function of how gradual (relatively) the rollout of AVs has been and will continue to be
NYC is a tough place to drive in. There are pedestrians and bikes and scooters coming at you from every direction. When you make turns, you have to look everywhere to make sure you aren't going to hit someone. I can't look behind me. But my car can. And so I have found that our self-driving car is able to navigate the crowded and chaotic streets of NYC so much better than we can and almost certainly better than any human can.
As many of you know, I dropped a writer coin, $AVC, yesterday and wrote about it after the fact. Now that it is out there, I feel like I need to invest in it. So I think you can expect me to post more in the coming weeks and months.
The "market cap" of $AVC is about $2mm as of this morning. What that means is the current token price of $0.002 times the 1bn fully diluted number of $AVC tokens equals $2mm. I don't have all of those tokens and neither does anyone else.
Right now, I have vested into about $10k of $AVC tokens. I received an allocation of 50% of all of the $AVC coins and I will vest into them monthly over three years so if the price hangs in there, I could own $1mm of $AVC in three years. That's pretty cool.
What's also cool is many of my readers, subscribers, and Farcaster followers, also got $AVC in the airdop yesterday and they could earn real value if $AVC increases over time. This is how the airdrop was set up on Paragraph (the numbers in this image are fake, mine were very different).
That probably sounds crazy to many people reading this. A car is a better driver than a human?
Yes.
That's the reality of where are in 2025. Not everyone realizes it. But that is where we are.
And, as Nikhil points out, the downstream effects of this technology and behavior change are going to be profound.
So that's all good.
But there were also some snags in the launch.
This cast by Colin, the founder of Paragraph, explains one of the issues.
We discovered a bug with the the Uniswap pool's liquidity which prevented buys after a certain price threshold. We've been working with Doppler to rectify this, and the only solution was to relaunch the coin with proper params and update avc.xyz/coin. The coin's CA is
0x06fc3d5d2369561e28f261148576520f5e49d6ea
For those that previously purchased the coin, we're really sorry about this. Please sell your original position into the original pool. If you received rewards from the original coin, you can also re-claim the full amount on avc.xyz/coin.
I've also heard from many longtime readers and subscribers and followers on Farcaster that they did not receive the email to claim their $AVC. I am not going to take on the project of fixing that for everyone. I am sorry if the airdrop didn't go correctly for many of you, but I don't have the time or the energy to attempt to fix that for each of you.
Finally, some of you raised the question about people who subscribed to AVC after the airdrop and whether they will receive $AVC. I would like to make that happen but need to figure out how to avoid people gaming that. So that's work to be done and I am willing to take that one on.
So that's where my head is at right now on $AVC. I continue to be very intrigued by the possibility of writer coins as a business model for content creators who make long form content. Like me.
That probably sounds crazy to many people reading this. A car is a better driver than a human?
Yes.
That's the reality of where are in 2025. Not everyone realizes it. But that is where we are.
And, as Nikhil points out, the downstream effects of this technology and behavior change are going to be profound.
So that's all good.
But there were also some snags in the launch.
This cast by Colin, the founder of Paragraph, explains one of the issues.
We discovered a bug with the the Uniswap pool's liquidity which prevented buys after a certain price threshold. We've been working with Doppler to rectify this, and the only solution was to relaunch the coin with proper params and update avc.xyz/coin. The coin's CA is
0x06fc3d5d2369561e28f261148576520f5e49d6ea
For those that previously purchased the coin, we're really sorry about this. Please sell your original position into the original pool. If you received rewards from the original coin, you can also re-claim the full amount on avc.xyz/coin.
I've also heard from many longtime readers and subscribers and followers on Farcaster that they did not receive the email to claim their $AVC. I am not going to take on the project of fixing that for everyone. I am sorry if the airdrop didn't go correctly for many of you, but I don't have the time or the energy to attempt to fix that for each of you.
Finally, some of you raised the question about people who subscribed to AVC after the airdrop and whether they will receive $AVC. I would like to make that happen but need to figure out how to avoid people gaming that. So that's work to be done and I am willing to take that one on.
So that's where my head is at right now on $AVC. I continue to be very intrigued by the possibility of writer coins as a business model for content creators who make long form content. Like me.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
