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Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

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Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

#1
I know lots of people use tokens to run coding agents, but I'm interested in hearing from people who are burning large amounts of tokens on automated tasks that aren't driving some kind of agent.

Do you have processes set up that are e.g. processing documents, audio, or video files? Particularly interested in hearing from people doing this in a business context.

Re: Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

#2
We process a lot of business documents at scale, invoices, sales orders, insurance documents and so on. Our token usage easily go beyond 50 to 100 million tokens per day.

We use a routing approach where simpler tasks go to smaller, cheaper models and more complex tasks go to frontier models. We are also working on having our own model for some of these workloads.

Document processing is probably one of our biggest agent use cases for tokens at this scale.

Re: Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

#5
post #2

We process a lot of business documents at scale, invoices, sales orders, insurance documents and so on. Our token usage easily go beyond 50 to 100 million tokens per day. We use a routing approach where simpler tasks go to smaller, cheaper models and more complex tasks go to frontier models. We are also working on having our own model for some of these workloads. Document processing is probably one of our biggest age…

Interested in this kind of work. How did you get into this niche?

Re: Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

#7
post #2

We process a lot of business documents at scale, invoices, sales orders, insurance documents and so on. Our token usage easily go beyond 50 to 100 million tokens per day. We use a routing approach where simpler tasks go to smaller, cheaper models and more complex tasks go to frontier models. We are also working on having our own model for some of these workloads. Document processing is probably one of our biggest age…

Is this through LLM providers on a metered API connection?

You're probably at the scale that having your own hardware to run local models is worth it, even if it's a couple of mac minis or mac pros in a cupboard in your office.

Re: Ask HN: If you're burning tokens at scale, what are you using them for?

#9
post #2

We process a lot of business documents at scale, invoices, sales orders, insurance documents and so on. Our token usage easily go beyond 50 to 100 million tokens per day. We use a routing approach where simpler tasks go to smaller, cheaper models and more complex tasks go to frontier models. We are also working on having our own model for some of these workloads. Document processing is probably one of our biggest age…

Is this through LLM providers on a metered API connection? You're probably at the scale that having your own hardware to run local models is worth it, even if it's a couple of mac minis or mac pros in a cupboard in your office.

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