Yes, but that token growth chart looks linear to me. There's the usual summer slump and then growth catches up once the autumn begins, but if you plot a line from the winter growth period at the start of 2025 you end up roughly in the right place except for an unusual spike in the most recent month (maybe another big user).

I'd have liked to see a chart of all tokens broken down by category rather than just percentages, but what this data seems to be saying is that growth isn't exponential, and is being dominated by growth in programming. A lot of the spending in AI is being driven by the assumption that it'll be used for everything everywhere. Perhaps it's just OpenRouter's user base, but if this data is representative then it implies AI adoption isn't growing all that fast outside of the tech industry (especially as "science" is nearly all AI related discussion).

This feels intuitively likely. I haven't seen many obvious signs of AI adoption around me once I leave the office. Microsoft has been struggling to sell its Copilot offerings to ordinary MS Office users, who apparently aren't that keen. The big wins are going to be existing apps and data pipelines calling out to AI, and it'll just take time to figure out what those use cases are and integrate them. Integrating even present-day AI into the long tail of non-tech industries is probably going to take decades.

Also odd: no category for students cheating on homework? I notice that "editing services" is a big chunk of the "academia" category. Probably most of that traffic goes direct to chatgpt.com and bypasses OpenRouter entirely.