This content was created by Robert Ta. This content was uploaded by Robert Ta. This is a YouTube video titled "Open models just passed 78% of AI tokens on Vercel" (published 2026-09-29). It contains a conversational segment between Robert Ta and another speaker discussing Vercel AI Gateway usage metrics (open-weight models reaching ~78.4% token volume), provider dollar spend (Anthropic still ~64%), the DeepSeek v4.1 Flash launch and its chart dominance, cost and caching advantages of open-source models, routing/token strategies, and implications for builders running long-lived agents and domain-specific use cases.
Chapters
On Vercel AI Gateway, OpenWeight models hit a record 78.4% token volume on September 18th, while roughly 64% of the dollars still went to Anthropic. DeepSeek shipped version 4.1 Flash on September 10th. If you take a look at this dollar spend, says that number 3 and 4 on the AI leaderboards here are Moonshot AI and DeepSeek. If you add in ZAI, Their combined dollar spend surpasses number 2, which is OpenAI. That's pretty crazy. And it shifts a slight inflection point that I've been hearing from the All-In podcast hosts where they keep saying like, dude, next thing is just going to be open source models fine-tuned for your use cases with domain-specific harnesses. And then shift and allocate a certain amount of compute to the frontier intelligence where you need it. But for everything else, just do this. And here's some data to back that claim. And you could go to the AI model leaderboards here on vercel.com. You can actually see the top models, labs, apps, and providers on AI in terms of usage, at least on the Vercel platform, if you trust their data and all that. You know, there's other platforms as well, but this is a good sampling, I'd say.
You know, I think we're going to be using routers and routing tokens to open source models that just be part of our stack and set of tools that we use. That seems pretty inevitable. The lead that they kind of buried here was that the DeepSeek V4 4.1 launch this week seems to be very popular. It pretty much took over the chart this week. So you see less of the other tokens being used and then like more than ever before tokens being used with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. One thing it's good for, cost is low, the caching performance is very good. And so what it allows you to do is run these long-running tasks like a goal loop or a long-running coding agent at fractions of cost to what you pay OpenAI or Anthropic. And so I think you got companies, builders like us out there testing and just like saying, let's just set the agents on autonomous and have them build like infinite software now. I think that was the unlock this week, that the open source model was good enough to try some of these experiments. The Vercel data probably isn't representative across the board of builders, but it is a specific type of builder and the kind of tools they're picking up and using. And I think that's a signal to latch onto. That's, uh, really interesting.
