So is the hypothesis that OpenAI’s usage is heavily regionally skewed to… wherever classes end that date? I’m guessing US, because that’s what I guess when somebody forgets there’s a planet attached to their country.
Exactly. Some universities end their spring terms in early May. Some in early June. K12 schools tend to more consistently end their years in early June, but that’s still spread out over a few weeks.
Yeah that kind of coordination coming from the end of the school year doesn’t make sense. Zooming out a bit it looks like there was just a spike in May 2025. It was all useage of a particular model, OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, which barely registers outside of these short periods of high use in March and then May of 2025. I don’t really know what a ‘token’ is so maybe it’s not a 1:1 comparison when useage shifts between different models? Or the data’s bad? Or some particular project used that model a large amount in those specific months?
A token is the “word” equivalent as far as AI is concerned. It’s just not a full word, it’s whatever unit of meaning the neural network has decided makes sense (so “ish” can be a token by itself, for instance). Point is, tokens processed is just a proxy for “amount of text the thing spat out”.
At a glance, and I haven’t looked into it, this looks like a product launch or a product getting replaced or removed, maybe putting something free behind a paywall or whatever. Definitely not the school year ending in a particular place. It’s pretty clearly misinfo, I’d just have to do more homework to figure out what kind than I’m willing to do for this purpose, but your assessment definitely makes a ton more sense than the OP.
June 6th is not when school’s out over here.
So is the hypothesis that OpenAI’s usage is heavily regionally skewed to… wherever classes end that date? I’m guessing US, because that’s what I guess when somebody forgets there’s a planet attached to their country.
Schools in the US don’t all follow the same schedule; it varies drastically state to state, and can even vary by district within any given state.
Even worse for that hypothesis, then. Assuming the poster was from the US in the first place.
Exactly. Some universities end their spring terms in early May. Some in early June. K12 schools tend to more consistently end their years in early June, but that’s still spread out over a few weeks.
Yeah that kind of coordination coming from the end of the school year doesn’t make sense. Zooming out a bit it looks like there was just a spike in May 2025. It was all useage of a particular model, OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, which barely registers outside of these short periods of high use in March and then May of 2025. I don’t really know what a ‘token’ is so maybe it’s not a 1:1 comparison when useage shifts between different models? Or the data’s bad? Or some particular project used that model a large amount in those specific months?
A token is the “word” equivalent as far as AI is concerned. It’s just not a full word, it’s whatever unit of meaning the neural network has decided makes sense (so “ish” can be a token by itself, for instance). Point is, tokens processed is just a proxy for “amount of text the thing spat out”.
At a glance, and I haven’t looked into it, this looks like a product launch or a product getting replaced or removed, maybe putting something free behind a paywall or whatever. Definitely not the school year ending in a particular place. It’s pretty clearly misinfo, I’d just have to do more homework to figure out what kind than I’m willing to do for this purpose, but your assessment definitely makes a ton more sense than the OP.
I’m guessing any college that wants to hop on trends has an LLM class that chugs through tokens.
Is that relevant to the June date? Universities aren’t any more internationally consistent than other tiers of education, to my knowledge.