Why The Ai Capability Multiplier Has Compressed To 3.1 Months From 3.5

I have been tracking the progress of AI since January 2025, since Trump’s inauguration. Initially, starting at one, I pegged the doubling factor at 3.5 months; then I adjusted it lower to 3.3 on August 17th. After further research, I am settling it back to 3.1, which is 13.43 weeks. This is the time it takes for AI to double in raw ability, breadth, and the ability to create useful work.

Today, that number stands at 52. Think about it. AI is 52 times more capable today than 20 months ago. But it is rising geometrically, and by the end of December, it will be 130. By the end of March 2027, it will be 252; by June, it will stand at 494. One year from now, at the close of business, it will rise to 768. And finally, when Trump completes his term in 2028, it will be an astronomical 26,454.

Let that sink in. If we have 52 reasons to worry about AI today, how will we cope with 26,454? Indeed, we live the era of “Future Shock” that the Toffler’s wrote about in 1970: the masses will treat it as magic or even as the rise of AI god.

Let me give you a couple why am compressing to 3.1.

On August 19, 2026, Patrick Collison, John Collison, and William Gaybrick signed a private letter to Stripe investors. OpenRouter, they said, would join Stripe as the largest acquisition the company has ever made.¹ They wrote:

“It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.”¹

What does this mean?

They saw a leapfrog change in new-firm creation and the ginormous leap of token consumption. They named it the singularity and dated it as January 1. The same day they announced the purchase of OpenRouter for $7.5 billion.²

By the way, this is not my date, and it is not a claim that machines somehow surpassed human intelligence.

The same letter says agents are “on the cusp of becoming economic actors.” It treats capital and intelligence as the two digital flows under every business. It calls tokens the “new currency of intelligence capital.” It says stablecoins will likely be boosted as they become the “native currency of the AI economy.”¹ In the newsroom, Patrick Collison called tokens the “central currency” for companies building with AI.² In March, they had already published a protocol for agents to pay businesses and one another.⁴

To clarify, payment and/or asset tokens are NOT the same as the tokens of AI compute.

They are building payments so AI agents can buy and sell. Agent-to-agent, tokenized e-commerce is the future of the Internet. Don’t think they are only selling a checkout button. They are not! There is no human in the loop.

Nate B. Jones posted a video on or about August 24 titled “Stripe Paid $7.5 Billion For OpenRouter. You Are Living In The Age Of Startups.”⁵ He restated their private line: as far as Stripe is concerned, the singularity began January 1, 2026.

Jones walked the consumption curve. He said OpenRouter-reported token volume grew about 24,000 times from August 2023 to August 2026, doubling every 11 weeks for three years. He said the week of August 10, 2026 closed at 75 trillion tokens, and the next week was pacing above 87 trillion. He compared that 11-week double to Moore’s law. Token throughput is not necessarily useful work, but you get the idea.⁵

Matt Murphy and Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures, writing August 19, put the same curve at about 30,000 times since launch, to a 4.5-plus quadrillion-token annual run rate, growing 33 percent month over month and doubling every 11 weeks, from about 3 billion tokens a week at the August 10, 2023 rebrand.⁶ OpenRouter’s own blog said it now processes more than 10 trillion tokens a day, with at least ten times growth in inference volume every year.⁷ The letter says OpenRouter token consumption has been compounding at 9 percent a week this year.¹ The letter’s 9 percent a week and Menlo’s about 30,000 times are the same kind of object as Jones’s 24,000 times.

The Tokenization of the Stock Market

The disruption most people will meet first is the listed stock market, and it will happen through three programs, not one event. On December 11, 2025, SEC staff issued a no-action letter to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) for DTCC Tokenization Services. Eligible assets at launch are Russell 1000 stocks, U.S. Treasuries, and ETFs that track major indexes. The tokens are digital records of claims the broker already holds. Registered ownership “would remain registered in the name of Cede & Co., DTC’s nominee.”⁸

NYSE said in January it was building a tokenized-securities platform but stated no launch date.⁹ Nasdaq said in March it would launch an issuer-sponsored equity token design, operational in the first half of 2027.¹⁰ DTCC processed production trades on July 15 and said the day set the stage for an October 2026 service launch.¹¹ Those are three programs.

So, October is DTCC’s launch. A customer at a conventional U.S. broker does not wake up on October 1 able to trade a tokenized share around the clock. The service lets member firms convert claims they already hold at DTC into on-chain copies that still sit under Cede & Co. The customer’s app changes only if that broker later turns the conversion on. Cede & Co. has been the nominee on American securities for decades, and a tokenized entitlement does not take that name off the register. People think they own the shares. The registered owner is still Cede & Co. That is disruption the customer does not see.

I have no way to measure inference-token consumption from that depository service. I expect it to run off the charts.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this. More uses appear, and they appear faster, because the infrastructure and work are already being built: payments that let an agent buy from another agent, a model router that bills tokens as intelligence capital, and tokenized claims that still sit under Cede & Co.

A developer does not invent a firm from nothing. He plugs a model into OpenRouter, bills the tokens, and an agent can already pay.

Discovery of new uses can look sudden and still be predictable, because the uses were waiting for those payments, the AI, that router, and those claims.

These are a couple of reasons I compressed the multiplier to 3.1 months, and all I can say is, “Brace yourselves,” because it is going to be a wild ride into the future.

References

1. Patrick Collison, John Collison, and William Gaybrick, Stripe investor letter, August 19, 2026. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28565866/stripes-august-2026-investor-letter.pdf
2. Stripe, “Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter to help businesses optimize token routing and usage,” August 19, 2026. https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-agrees-to-acquire-openrouter
3. Dan Primack and Ryan Lawler, “Scoop: Stripe says ‘the singularity’ has begun,” Axios, August 19, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/19/stripe-payments-openrouter-singularity
4. Stripe, “Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol,” March 18, 2026. https://stripe.com/blog/machine-payments-protocol
5. Nate B. Jones, “Stripe Paid $7.5 Billion For OpenRouter. You Are Living In The Age Of Startups,” YouTube, about August 24, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgyQ5r6bnmc
6. Matt Murphy and Deedy Das, “Stripe to Acquire OpenRouter: Why Everyone Is Obsessed With Model Routing,” Menlo Ventures, August 19, 2026. https://menlovc.com/perspective/stripe-to-acquire-openrouter-why-everyone-is-obsessed-with-model-routing/
7. OpenRouter, “OpenRouter is Joining Stripe,” August 19, 2026. https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/openrouter-is-joining-stripe/
8. SEC staff, No-Action Letter to Brian Steele and Nadine Chakar, The Depository Trust Company, December 11, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/files/tm/no-action/dtc-nal-121125.pdf
9. Intercontinental Exchange, “The New York Stock Exchange Develops Tokenized Securities Platform,” January 19, 2026. https://ir.theice.com/press/news-details/2026/The-New-York-Stock-Exchange-Develops-Tokenized-Securities-Platform/default.aspx
10. Nasdaq, “Nasdaq to launch equity token design, putting issuers at the center of tokenization,” March 9, 2026. https://ir.nasdaq.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nasdaq-launch-equity-token-design-putting-issuers-center
11. DTCC / BusinessWire, “DTCC Turns Tokenization into Reality: U.S. Trades Successfully Processed Using DTC-Tokenized Assets,” July 15, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260715664564/en/DTCC-Turns-Tokenization-into-Reality-U.S.-Trades-Successfully-Processed-Using-DTC-Tokenized-Assets