The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm Rosie Blau.
And I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, a new leap in sophisticated scams
and why Allbirds is stepping away from shoes.
But first.
It may not have escaped your notice that AI is everywhere.
In Silicon Valley, techies apparently like to do something called token-maxing,
a race to burn through tokens, which are the fundamental units of data,
usually a word or symbol, that power AI models.
They are, of course, trying to show off just how much artificial intelligence they're using.
And it is a lot.
OpenRouter, which is a marketplace for AI models, reports that from January to March,
the number of tokens processed each week quadrupled.
But there's a problem.
The industry that supports AI isn't expanding at the same rate.
Could we be facing a looming supply crunch?
The AI companies are actually struggling to keep up with demand.
And in recent times, they have actually been throttling access to some of their tools.