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This audio production is intended to bring new technologies that impact our lives, like digital assets, central bank digital currencies and artificial intelligence in an easy to understand way to a larger audience.

In this episode, we discuss an empirical study, based on an analysis of over 100 trillion tokens of real-world LLM interactions, highlighted a definitive shift toward complex reasoning and agentic workflows. The field moved from single-pass generation to multi-step deliberation inference following the release of reasoning-optimized models in late 2024. By late 2025, the token share consumed by reasoning models exceeded 50%. This shift enables agentic inference, evidenced by a rise in requests successfully invoking tools (reaching 15% overall). Workloads also became significantly more complex, with the average prompt length growing roughly fourfold (1.5K to over 6K tokens), driven primarily by context-heavy programming tasks.

The market is structurally plural, operating as a dual ecosystem where proprietary models handle high-value, reliable workloads, while open-weight (OSS) models capture high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks. OSS usage grew steadily to approximately one-third of overall usage. Chinese OSS models emerged as a major competitive force, achieving nearly 30% of total usage in some weeks. Usage shows strong specialization: Programming grew to the dominant use case overall, exceeding 50% of total token volume, while creative roleplay remains immensely popular for open models, accounting for over 50% of all OSS tokens.

Adoption stability is defined by the Cinderella “Glass Slipper” effect: foundational cohorts of users whose workloads achieve a persistent technical fit with a new model resist substitution, securing long-term retention. This stickiness persists despite macro-level demand being relatively price-inelastic, indicating users prioritize superior reasoning and reliability over marginal cost savings for critical tasks. Furthermore, the market is becoming decentralized, with Asia's share of global spend more than doubling to approximately 31%.

For more on AI, check out Leon's books on the subject. They can then be found on Amazon next to his other publications: http://tiny.cc/cbdc

More information is available on www.digitalekho.com