令牌是机器智能的新货币

在当今人工智能的景观中，令牌已成为机器智能的基本单位。

Two quick announcements before I jump into today’s post!

在我进入今天的帖子之前，有两个快速公告！

One, I will be chatting with Kevin Kelly in my live show tomorrow at 12pm ET / 9am PT on the Substack app. Two, I am speaking at SXSW next week. If you’re there, join me for an Exponential View meet-up.

第一，我将在明天的现场表演中与凯文·凯利（Kevin Kelly）聊天。第二，我下周在SXSW上讲话。如果您在那里，请加入我的指数观看聚会。

OK, now onto our regular programming.

好的，现在进入我们的常规编程。

In today’s landscape of artificial intelligence, the token has emerged as the fundamental unit of machine intelligence. Tokens are the building blocks of AI communication—the bite-sized pieces through which humans and machines exchange information. When you type “What is the weather today?”, an AI system breaks this into individual tokens like “What”, “is”, “the”, “weather”, etc., processes them, and then generates new tokens that form its response. Tokens transform your question into something the AI can understand, and the tokens it produces in return represent the machine’s carefully constructed answer.

在当今人工智能的景观中，令牌已成为机器智能的基本单位。令牌是AI通信的基础，这是人类和机器交换信息的咬合大小的作品。当您键入“今天的天气是什么？”时，AI系统将其分解为“什么”，“ IS”，“”，“天气”等单个令牌，然后对其进行处理，然后生成形成其响应的新令牌。代币将您的问题转换为AI可以理解的东西，其产生的令牌代表了机器精心构造的答案。

Understanding the scale of the token market is incredibly valuable, as this insight provides a clear, intuitive grasp of the market size of the genAI economy.

了解代币市场的规模非常有价值，因为这种见解提供了对Genai经济市场规模的清晰，直观的掌握。

It helps estimate the infrastructure necessary to sustain growth, particularly in terms of computing resources like GPUs and other specialized chips. While the initial demand for AI training capabilities fuelled Nvidia’s historic market capitalization surge past $3 trillion in 2024, sustained token usage for inference — representing demand for genAI — will be crucial to maintaining this valuation.

它有助于估计维持增长所需的基础设施，特别是在计算GPU和其他专业芯片等计算资源方面。尽管对AI培训能力的最初需求促进了NVIDIA在2024年3万亿美元的历史性市值增长，但推断的持续代币使用（代表对Genai的需求）对于维持这一估值至关重要。

But accurately assessing this market, especially in the US, can be challenging. Major technology firms typically remain guarded and reveal only limited information about their actual usage. So analysts often rely on reported revenue figures, which, while helpful, give only partial visibility into true market dynamics.

但是准确评估这个市场，尤其是在美国，可能具有挑战性。主要的技术公司通常会保持警惕，并仅透露有关其实际用途的有限信息。因此，分析师经常依靠报告的收入数据，尽管有帮助，但只能在真正的市场动态中提供部分知名度。

Now valuable insights have begun to emerge from the Chinese market. Recently disclosed data points from China — like the DeepSeek numbers we referenced in the Monday email — offer a rare glimpse into actual usage patterns. This can help us construct a more comprehensive picture of the global token economy.

现在，有价值的见解已经开始从中国市场出现。最近披露了来自中国的数据点（例如我们在星期一电子邮件中引用的DeepSeek数字），罕见地了解了实际使用模式。这可以帮助我们构建对全球代币经济的更全面的了解。

Software markets commonly exhibit a distinct pattern of concentration: a small number of companies or products tend to massively dominate a given segment or geographic market. Because this dominance is so pronounced, even limited data about the largest players can serve to illuminate the overall structure and size of the market.

软件市场通常表现出独特的集中度：少数公司或产品往往会大大统治给定的细分市场或地理市场。由于这种主导地位是如此明显，因此即使是关于最大玩家的数据有限的数据也可以阐明市场的整体结构和规模。

Helpfully, this power law dynamic considerably simplifies market analysis. Even a few data points, like those emerging from China, can provide surprising insights into the global AI token economy.

有益的是，这种权力法动态大大简化了市场分析。即使是从中国出现的数据点，也可以为全球AI代币经济提供令人惊讶的见解。

This approach, of course, has notable limitations: it isn’t bottom-up and it captures only a snapshot in time—specifically, the token market from late 2024 to early 2025. However, it helps us understand the scale of the numbers involved and the implications for infrastructure and investment.

当然，这种方法具有明显的局限性：它不是自下而上的，它仅捕获了时间的快照 - 特别是，从2024年底到2025年初的代币市场。但是，它有助于我们了解涉及数量的规模以及对基础架构和投资的影响。

Over to China

到中国

Looking at this particular report, Baidu’s Wenxiaoyan service was delivering 1 trillion tokens per day in August 2024, with API calls having increased 30-fold over one year. Bytedance’s Doubao went over 4 trillion tokens per day following several price cuts, with token usage growing 33 times in a single year.

查看这份特定的报告，百度的Wenxiaoyan服务在2024年8月每天提供1万亿个令牌，API电话在一年内增加了30倍。几次降价后，Bytedance的Doubao每天超过4万亿个令牌，一年中的代币使用量增长了33次。

The report also hinted that there were 200 Chinese firms delivering at least 1 billion tokens per day. We know that Doubao sits at 4 trillion per day, while the 200th-ranked firm delivers around a billion tokens per day. DeepSeek recently announced they served 750 billion tokens daily to a diverse range of customers, both domestically and internationally.

该报告还暗示，每天有200家中国公司至少提供10亿个令牌。我们知道，Doubao每天以4万亿美元的价格坐着，而排名第200的公司每天提供约10亿个令牌。 DeepSeek最近宣布，他们每天在国内和国际上为各种客户提供7500亿个令牌。

Using these three data points, we can begin to estimate the market’s overall size. I used a modified Zipf distribution, a discrete probability distribution that follows a power law where the frequency of an element is inversely proportional to its rank. In market analysis, Zipf’s law often manifests when the market share of the nth largest company is approximately proportional to 1/n. I’ve adapted this distribution to account for the specific characteristics of the token market, allowing us to estimate the entire market from limited data points about the largest players.

使用这三个数据点，我们可以开始估计市场的整体规模。我使用了修改后的ZIPF分布，这是一个遵循功率定律的离散概率分布，其中元素的频率与其等级成反比。在市场分析中，ZIPF定律经常表现出第n个最大公司的市场份额大约成正比1/n。我已经调整了此分配以说明令牌市场的特定特征，从而使我们能够从有关最大参与者的有限数据点估算整个市场。

The chart above provides five different distributions of token usage by the largest Chinese genAI firms, ranging from the most concentrated market (orange 🟠) to the least (green 🟢). Each resembles common distribution curves observed in other markets: orange like web search, blue like enterprise software, red like cloud computing and yellow and green like non-technology markets.

上图提供了最大的中国Genai公司的五个不同分布，从最集中的市场（橙色）到最少（绿色）。每一个都类似于在其他市场中观察到的常见分布曲线：橙色搜索，蓝色企业软件，红色像云计算以及黄色和绿色（如非技术市场）。

Summing across all samples allows us to estimate the market’s total size and make educated guesses about market concentration.

总结所有样本使我们能够估算市场的总规模，并就市场集中度提出良好的猜测。

My best guess is that the Chinese genAI market today might resemble something between the orange and blue curves, with Doubao, Wenxiaoyan and DeepSeek being the largest players. The market might be less concentrated publicly, though probably not significantly below the blue curve.

我最好的猜测是，当今中国的Genai市场可能类似于橙色曲线和蓝色曲线之间的某些东西，而Doubao，Wenxiaoyan和Deepseek是最大的球员。市场可能不集中，尽管可能不高于蓝色曲线。

I’ve also built a preview calculator that lets you play around with some of the parameters here. This simplified version isn’

我还构建了一个预览计算器，可让您在这里使用一些参数。这个简化的版本是