The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm Rosie Bloor.

And I'm Jason Palmer.

Today on the show, a new leap in sophisticated scams and why all birds is stepping away from shoes.

But first...

...and... 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, the power AI models.

They are, of course, trying to show off just how much artificial intelligence they use. 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.

Shalas Chitnes is a global business writer.

So for example, Anthropic, which is a large AI model maker, recently changed the terms of its

service so that it dissuades a lot of its users from using capacity at peak times.

Open AI, which is another big AI company, shut down SORA, which is its video generation tool, because it wanted to allocate its scarce computing resources towards more lucrative venture.

So across the entire technology stack, AI companies are looking at different ways in which they can meet the demand with the amount of processing power that they have.

So you talk about processing power that they have.

...