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> According to Perplexity, my AI chatbot of choice, this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models.

Don't publish things like that. At the very least link to a transcript, but this is a very non-credible way of reporting those numbers.

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That implies a throughput of around 16 million tokens per second. Since coding agent loops are inherently sequential—you have to wait for the inference to finish before the next step—that volume seems architecturally impossible. You're bound by latency, not just cost.

The original post claimed they were "running hundreds of concurrent agents":

https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

It was 2,000 concurrent agents at peak.

I'd still be surprised if that added up to "trillions" of tokens. A trillion is a very big number.

16 million a second across 2000 agents would be 8000 tokens per second per agent. This doesn't seem right to me.

I mean, its right there in their blog - https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

"We've deployed trillions of tokens across these agents toward a single goal. The system isn't perfectly efficient, but it's far more effective than we expected."

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