Quote · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
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How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years?
At 41:16 · chapter starts 37:00
Harry opens with the customer concentration question — can Fireworks survive a Cursor churn given a potential SpaceX acquisition? Lin pivots to the broader portfolio: 2024 was the year of coding, 2025 is the year of co-work, and co-work customers span legal, finance, healthcare, consumer-facing recommendation systems, and beyond. He then drops a striking operational disclosure: Fireworks processes more than 40 trillion tokens per day, the majority from customised models. When Harry asks where that number goes in a year, Lin offers a range of 20x to 100x — and argues that at those growth rates, the idea that AI CapEx is in a bubble is simply wrong. The world is bottlenecked by physical supply chains, not by lack of demand.
Lin Qiao projects Fireworks' token throughput could grow 20x to 100x by end of next year as AI adoption accelerates.
Cursor, an early Fireworks customer when it was a single-digit-million company, grew approximately 1,000x over two years.
Marc Benioff reportedly spends about 3.8% of Salesforce developer salaries on Anthropic's Claude Code product.
