One AI coder burns up to 100x more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user — that single "red dot" on the adoption chart is causing the entire compute shortage.
God Mode Podcast
One AI coder burns up to 100x more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user — that single "red dot" on the adoption chart is causing the entire compute shortage.
TL;DR
Rik, Ben, and guest Matt break down the week's sharpest AI moves: Anthropic overtook OpenAI in business adoption (per Ramp data), OpenAI fired back with 30 days of free Codex for new businesses, and xAI launched Grok Build for developers. Rik cancelled his $100 Claude Max plan live on air, splitting the budget across Cursor, Codex, Claude, and xAI. The key takeaway: a single AI coder burns 60–100x more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user, making that "one red dot" on the AI adoption chart far more impactful than headcount suggests.
Rik, Ben, and guest Matt discuss the week's biggest AI news: Anthropic beating OpenAI in business adoption per Ramp data, OpenAI's free Codex response, xAI's Grok Build launch, the Claude Max plan cancellation controversy, token economics across AI tools, HTML vs Markdown for AI workflows, Notion's agent platform opening, and the Trump-Elon-Jensen China trip.
Chapter 4 · 04:08
The AI super cycle has four phases — Elon Musk is the only player in all of them.
A viral chart mapped the AI super cycle across four phases: semiconductors, data centre infrastructure, rare earths and robotics, and finally AGI software dominance. Elon Musk is the only player with meaningful positions in all four: silicon (Tesla DOJO), energy (solar/batteries), space (SpaceX), and physical AI (Optimus robot). That's not a coincidence.
Chapter 6 · 09:57
The AI adoption chart is lying to you — one coder burns 100x more compute than a casual user.
The viral 'AI adoption' chart misses the most important variable: token consumption. A single AI coder burns 60–100x more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user, meaning the one red dot representing 3.2 million people is actually equivalent to 50–100 dots in compute terms. That tiny slice of developers is the reason compute is scarce.
A developer using AI for coding burns 60 to 100 times more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user, meaning the compute shortage is driven by a tiny fraction of users.
One user was reported to have consumed 865 million tokens in a single month, costing approximately $2,500 in API fees.
Developer Peter Levels operates at a token consumption rate of 50 million tokens per minute, primarily due to open-source agentic pipelines running around the clock while he sleeps.
Chapter 8 · 18:54
Anthropic just beat OpenAI in business adoption — and the counterpunches are flying.
Anthropic beat OpenAI in business adoption for the first time per Ramp data, despite OpenAI owning ~85% of consumer mindshare. OpenAI responded immediately by offering Codex free for 30 days to new business sign-ups, then Anthropic raised Claude Code limits 50%. This push-pull battle to lock in enterprise customers is accelerating fast.
Per Ramp data, Anthropic overtook OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, despite OpenAI holding roughly 85% of consumer user share versus Anthropic's 5–10%.
OpenAI responded to Anthropic's business adoption milestone by offering Codex free for 30 days to new business sign-ups, escalating the enterprise AI wars.
Global token usage on OpenRouter went from 7 trillion in January 2026 to 28 trillion tokens by May 2026, a 4x increase in roughly five months.
Chapter 9 · 23:44
If all AI models are equal, the platform that switches between them wins.
If all AI models are roughly commodities that leapfrog each other monthly, the smart move is a platform that can switch between them. Cursor lets you access GPT 5.5, Claude Opus, and Grok in one place, avoids vendor lock-in, and gives you $180 of compute for $18/month. The platform, not the model, is the moat.
Matt highlighted that Cursor's lowest subscription tier at $18/month includes $180 worth of tokens, plus unlimited but slower Composer usage after that — making it an exceptional value.
Chapter 10 · 29:55
Cancelled my $100 Claude plan live on air — here's where the money goes instead.
Rik cancelled his $100/month Claude Max plan in real time, reallocating the spend to Cursor ($20), Codex ($20), Claude ($20), and xAI ($20). His logic: you don't need frontier models for most tasks, and diversifying across providers eliminates the frustration of hitting weekly token limits mid-week.
After Anthropic doubled daily limits without proportionally increasing weekly limits, Rik hit 92% of his weekly Claude limit by Thursday, illustrating the frustration of power users.
Rik cancelled his $100/month Claude Max subscription live on air, reallocating the spend across Cursor ($20), Codex ($20), Claude ($20), and xAI ($20), with $20 left for video generation.
Grok 4.1 Fast was available at less than one-tenth the cost of Grok 4.7, offering competitive intelligence at dramatically lower token prices before being discontinued.
Chapter 11 · 33:50
HTML beats Markdown for AI agents — but it'll cost you 5x the tokens.
An Anthropic researcher argued HTML is superior to Markdown for AI agent workflows — more visual, interactive, and human-readable. But Matt tested it and found HTML uses 5x more tokens per file. The tradeoff is real: visual clarity catches errors earlier and leads to better outputs, but the cost premium is significant for anyone already hitting their Claude limits.
Matt tested converting a Markdown file to HTML for AI agent consumption and found it used five times as many tokens, raising questions about whether the visual benefit justifies the cost.
Chapter 12 · 41:05
AI's viral new /goals feature is either a breakthrough or just rebranded hype.
Claude's new /goals feature went viral with stories of agents autonomously selling inventory over four days. Ben sees it as a critical North Star metric for agentic AI. Matt's counter: isn't this basically the same as the Wiggum loop from six months ago? And if you tell an AI to 'increase revenue per user,' it might just cancel your lowest-paying subscribers.
Chapter 13 · 49:45
Anthropic cut API limits by 40x — and businesses that built on their subsidy are scrambling.
Anthropic's new programmatic usage policy slashed third-party API rate limits by up to 40x for some businesses — even those paying $40k/month. Businesses that built products on Claude's subsidised pricing are now forced to rethink their architecture. Rik's blunt verdict: you built a business on their generosity; don't be surprised the generosity has limits.
Businesses that built products on top of Claude's API faced a ~40x reduction in rate limits after Anthropic changed its programmatic usage credit policy, forcing some to rethink their architecture.
Chapter 14 · 55:20
Twitter gave xAI data volume, not quality — and that's why Grok fell behind.
xAI had compute and Twitter's massive dataset, but Twitter content is not quality training data. That data quality gap is why Grok models lagged, and it's why xAI partnered with Cursor — whose codebase of production-validated pull requests is worth more than raw social media noise. Cursor's dataset could be worth $10 billion.
Access to xAI's Grok Build early beta is gated behind a Super Grok Heavy subscription costing approximately $600, limiting adoption to high-commitment users.
Chapter 15 · 1:00:25
Notion just opened up for AI agents — and it might be the stickiest moat in enterprise AI.
Notion launched a full agent SDK, CLI, webhooks, and database sync — positioning itself as the enterprise knowledge layer for AI agents. With 50% YoY revenue growth already, Notion is moving from business tool to AI agent platform. The risk: if businesses already have all their context in Notion, they won't migrate to native AI tools even if they're better.
Ben cited that Notion increased its revenue by approximately 50% year over year, driven largely by AI feature adoption within its platform.
Voice cloning is now good enough that people are using it to keep talking to ex-partners, and Matt noted he's surprised there aren't more scam cases impersonating loved ones. The tech is indistinguishable from real voices. xAI launching its own voice cloning just brought this capability further into the mainstream at lower cost.
Chapter 16 · 1:04:15
Peter Levels runs startups making $1M/month for less than the cost of a Notion subscription.
Peter Levels' infrastructure stack for his portfolio of startups costs less than a single Notion subscription per month, despite generating roughly $1 million in monthly revenue. The key: bare-metal VPS with Hetzner, Cloudflare for heavy tasks, and switching email from Resend to a native Cloudflare worker. AI now makes this level of lean infrastructure accessible to non-experts.
Rik reduced his Vercel CPU usage by 70% after analysing Peter Levels' minimal infrastructure stack with an AI and applying targeted optimisations, including routing heavy image rendering through Cloudflare.
Chapter 18 · 1:12:20
A chatbot today doesn't even let you be able to see the video and play it in the chat. So I don't see how that would be possible.
Chapter 19 · 1:16:38
Clicky is the Clippy that actually works — and it's open source.
Clicky is a floating desktop agent that lets you spawn tasks with your voice while hovering over any app. You can ask it to find Instagram influencers, clean your desktop, or set a reminder — all running in the background. Ben compared it to a Clippy that actually works. The first version is open source, following the classic hook-then-monetise playbook.
No indexed bits in this chapter.
The viral 'AI adoption' chart misses the most important variable: token consumption. A single AI coder burns 60–100x more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user, meaning the one red dot representing 3.2 million people is actually equivalent to 50–100 dots in compute terms. That tiny slice of developers is the reason compute is scarce.
Rik cancelled his $100/month Claude Max plan in real time, reallocating the spend to Cursor ($20), Codex ($20), Claude ($20), and xAI ($20). His logic: you don't need frontier models for most tasks, and diversifying across providers eliminates the frustration of hitting weekly token limits mid-week.
Anthropic's new programmatic usage policy slashed third-party API rate limits by up to 40x for some businesses — even those paying $40k/month. Businesses that built products on Claude's subsidised pricing are now forced to rethink their architecture. Rik's blunt verdict: you built a business on their generosity; don't be surprised the generosity has limits.
This episode
Factual claims made this episode, and whether a source was named.
A single AI coder burns 60 to 100 times more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user.
One user logged 865 million tokens in a single month, costing approximately $2,500 in API costs.
Anthropic overtook OpenAI in US business AI adoption for the first time, per Ramp data.
OpenAI offered Codex free for 30 days to new businesses in response to Anthropic's business adoption milestone.
Global token usage on OpenRouter grew from 7 trillion in January 2026 to 28 trillion tokens by May 2026.
Cursor's $18/month plan includes $180 worth of tokens, plus unlimited but slower Composer usage after the token allowance is exhausted.
Anthropic's new programmatic usage policy cut third-party API rate limits by approximately 40x for some businesses.
Converting a Markdown file to HTML for AI agent use consumed five times as many tokens.
Notion grew its revenue by approximately 50% year over year.
Peter Levels operates AI coding agents that consume approximately 50 million tokens per minute.
NVIDIA became the first company to reach a $5.5 trillion market capitalisation.
xAI's Grok 4.1 Fast was priced at less than one-tenth the cost of Grok 4.7.
xAI sold off part of its Colossus compute cluster to Anthropic because Grok models were not being used as much as expected.
Using Cloudflare as a caching and rendering layer between Vercel and end users cut Rik's Vercel CPU usage by 70%.
The Internet effectively closed down to AI scraping in the last two years, making it harder for new AI companies to access the quality training data that helped OpenAI and Anthropic reach GPT-4 level capability.
This episode
Discussed as the only player spanning all four phases of the AI super cycle, from silicon to robotics to space, including his role on Trump's China trade trip.
Indie hacker referenced as the extreme case of AI power usage (50M tokens/minute) and minimal infrastructure spend, with his low-cost stack held up as an aspirational model.
Trump's former AI task force adviser cited for publicly calling Anthropic's growth trajectory a path towards an AI monopoly.
NVIDIA's CEO mentioned as a passenger on Trump's flight to China alongside Elon Musk, following NVIDIA's record $5.5 trillion market cap milestone.
Central to the episode as the company that overtook OpenAI in business adoption and launched the new programmatic usage credit policy that angered third-party builders.
Discussed as Anthropic's main enterprise rival, responding to losing business adoption lead by offering free Codex access to new business sign-ups.
Elon Musk's AI company discussed for launching Grok Build, voice cloning, and connectors — seen as the fastest-moving but data-quality-constrained competitor in the AI space.
Discussed after launching an agent SDK, CLI, and webhooks to position itself as the enterprise AI knowledge layer, with 50% YoY revenue growth cited.
Discussed across multiple angles: its AI Book laptop launch, Gemma 4 lightweight model, investment in SpaceX, and talks to build data centres in space.
Discussed as the first company to reach a $5.5 trillion market cap and the dominant semiconductor player in Phase 1 of the AI super cycle.
Cloud network provider discussed as a cost-saving layer between Vercel and end users for image rendering, enabling Rik to stay on Vercel's free tier.
Mentioned as Elon Musk's vehicle for bringing AI into the physical world via the Optimus robot, and as a counter-example for how AI safety headlines are sensationalised.
AI video generation tool discussed as now integrated into Codex, raising the question of whether a standalone video editor or an embedded tool will dominate AI video creation.
Elon Musk's rocket company mentioned in the context of Google's talks to launch AI data centres in space and as a Google investment portfolio holding.
AI-powered IDE praised for its $18/month value, model-agnostic flexibility, and rumoured acquisition by xAI — positioned as the practical choice for vibe coders.
Anthropic's AI assistant and coding agent; discussed in the context of token limits, the Max plan cancellation, and new programmatic usage restrictions.
A floating voice-activated desktop AI agent tool, compared to a modern working version of Microsoft Clippy, with an open-source first version available on a waitlist.
xAI's new agentic CLI tool for coding and workflow automation, launched in early beta for Super Grok Heavy subscribers at approximately $600/month.
Open-source framework for programmatic video creation in React, used by Matt for AI-assisted video editing workflows within Cursor.
An AI voice chat tool described by Ben as the best voice model available, noted for its highly lifelike and empathetic conversational quality.
Stats
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.