The Loop  ·  Issue 017

The Loop

A field journal of the AI frontier — for engineers who ship.

  Lab bench

Experiment №004
filed Apr 21, 2026

game

Filed under

  • #game
  • #clicker
  • #idle

Tokens per second

A clicker game. Start with a laptop CPU, grind to frontier-lab hardware, unlock bigger models as you go.

  Primer

Skip if you already know the theory; the interactive is right below.

A clicker. You generate tokens. With enough of them you buy GPUs; with enough GPUs you unlock bigger models. The laptop CPU manages a fifth of a token per second. The B200 clears twelve thousand. The gap is where the game lives.

Progress is saved to this device. Sign in with GitHub to sync across browsers and appear on the leaderboard — it's opt-in, toggle from your account page.

▶  Try it

Wallet

0.0

tokens

Lifetime

0.0

tokens

Rate

0.0

tok/s

A B200 sits in a rack in Iowa. It has never loved anyone.

Hardware

  • A laptop CPU×0

    It runs. Slowly. · +0.2 tok/s

    15 tok
  • NVIDIA T4×0

    Serviceable. Cheap. · +3.0 tok/s

    200 tok
  • NVIDIA A100×0

    Workhorse of the mid-2020s. · +50 tok/s

    4.0K tok
  • NVIDIA H100×0

    Now we're cooking. · +800 tok/s

    80.0K tok
  • NVIDIA B200×0

    The frontier-lab tier. · +12.0K tok/s

    1.50M tok

Models — unlock by lifetime tokens

Next unlock: GPT-4 at 10.0K lifetime tokens (10.0K to go)

saved locally · sign in to sync

▤  Leaderboard · top 25

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  Notes from the bench

What to watch for, why it matters, and the one thing that usually surprises people.

The shape of it

Each tick is 100ms. Your tokens-per-second is (count × rate) summed across every hardware you own. Prices rise exponentially per unit bought — standard clicker math — so the next tier is always just barely out of reach.

Wallet tokens are spendable. Lifetime tokens never decrease; they're the leaderboard score and the gate for unlocking model tiers. Resetting preserves lifetime. Nothing is lost.

Three shapes you'll see

The first GPU changes everything. Clicking to 10K is a grind. A single T4 pays itself back in a few minutes and the rest of the early game is just remembering to click Buy.

Offline earnings exist and they're capped at 8h.Come back a day later and you still get 8 hours of passive output — enough to matter, not enough to make idling forever the strategy.

Leaderboard is total lifetime tokens. Not current wallet. Not current rate. Spending tokens on hardware doesn't hurt your rank; it accelerates it. Reset if the grind gets stale — lifetime survives.

In a line

An idle/clicker built around generating tokens. Hardware scales exponentially, model tiers unlock on lifetime milestones, and the leaderboard is opt-in by GitHub handle.

Other experiments

11
  1. Exp 001

    How a sentence becomes tokens

  2. Exp 002

    Temperature and top-p, visibly

  3. Exp 003

    What does this prompt actually cost?

  4. Exp 005

    How far should the model think?

  5. Exp 006

    Neural language vs a Markov chain

  6. Exp 007

    What each token looks at

  7. Exp 008

    Words in space

  8. Exp 009

    The injection arena

  9. Exp 010

    AI or human?

  10. Exp 011

    Context Tetris

  11. Exp 012

    Magnet flip