@levie: Agents spawning other agents, agents operating in the background on every task, and agent swarms will consume 1,000X mo…
Summary
Aaron Levie argues that agent swarms and background AI agents will consume 1,000X more tokens than one-at-a-time prompting, making plain chat-style AI usage a relic within a year or two and driving massive demand for compute and infrastructure.
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Cached at: 10/11/26, 03:15 PM
Agents spawning other agents, agents operating in the background on every task, and agent swarms will consume 1,000X more tokens than people prompting agents 1 at a time.
The usage of AI as a chat system that can only work for you at the pace that you can prompt it will seem like a relic within a year or two. The vast, vast majority of tokens will be consumed by agents that are just doing continuous work for us in the background and in our workflows.
This is why we’re still so early in the curve of AI agent adoption right now, and how much more compute and infrastructure build out will be needed to sustain this.
a16z (@a16z): Your next users are machines
Agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, up 14x in six months
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