Meta caps internal AI token spending

conartist6

I don't understand though. How will all the AI users replace all the non-AI users if they can't spend money that isn't theirs to win by default?

simonw

"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?

smrtinsert

That is insane. I'm sure companies will learn the absolute wrong lesson from this, and attempt to centralize and kneecap token usage.

dwoosley

I’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.

andsoitis

measure outcomes (impact), not effort (token usage, lines of code, code coverage, hours worked, etc.)

nsagent

Not surprising. It seems that the comment section of every coding agent thread has at least one person mentioning they use "tokenmaxxing" to increase their token usage because it was brought up during their quarterly review, at a standup, or some other communique from on high. Just wonder what happens when more and more companies introduce similar restrictions. Will that lead to devaluations of the LLM companies?

whalesalad

Clearly no one is using Meta’s customer facing AI products. Why aren’t they using their own gpu/compute for development?

Trasmatta

All those billions spent on tokens by Meta, and not a single iota of value generated by any of it

felix-the-cat

Within a few weeks of telling people at our company that if they don’t use AI they will be replaced by someone who does, they just announced that their allocation with ChatGPT has reset and are now panicking as they blew through their million token allocation for this month in under six hours - you can’t make this shit up.

root_axis

Not sure if I missed it but I couldn't find any information in the article to explain where the "approaching billions" estimate is coming from. I could believe it, but I'd want to see something a little more concrete.

bdcravens

And I still can't exhaust the limits on my Claude Max subscription, despite being more productive than I've ever been in terms of real work (ie, things that actually make money)

ryanschaefer

Wasn’t this already reported on? FWIW this article links to primary sources from early last month https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta...

d4rkp4ttern

Ok I’ll ask since nobody else has — are they not giving their devs a Claude code max or Codex Pro subscription? If so, why is token cost approaching billions? And if not, why not?

wonderwonder

I have never worked there and I am likely very unqualified to ever work there and Zuck has more money than I could dream of so take my comment with that in mind. Meta sounds like a cluster-F of a place to work. Massive reorgs around wild ideas like the metaverse and everything Ai all the time. Employees terrified of being fired. Incentivizing token spending and then cutting it off. While the overall company may be fine, the dev department sounds rudderless and absolutely miserable.

linzhangrun

This is what you get when token consumption becomes a KPI...

xnx

It's stories like this that really dispell the genius/merit theory of successful business. The best you can say about Zuck is he didn't prevent Facebook from becoming huge.

hodgehog11

Judging from the decisions and outputs of the last decade or so, the leadership at Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg, have got to be among the most incompetent I have ever seen. They go all in on the worst decisions; not just the worst in hindsight, but also the worst at the time . The only thing keeping them afloat is their monopoly from past purchases. They are a posterchild for why the US is no longer a properly capitalist nation.

ChrisArchitect

2 week old news OP; Various discussions: Meta’s chaotic AI strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602571 Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461 Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708795

peter_d_sherman

>"The internal memo disclosed that Meta employees consumed 73.7 trillion tokens in roughly 30 days , a figure tracked on an internal leaderboard called "Claudeonomics" — a reference to Anthropic's Claude, one of the third-party AI tools widely used inside the company [2]. The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output. Meta plans to dismantle the leaderboard and replace it with a centralized monitoring platform called "AI Gateway," which will track usage and spending across teams in real time [2]." This seems to be an interesting upcoming business, that is: Helping companies centralize and track their AI usage by employee. Anyway, great article!

noashavit

Uber, Microsoft and now Meta. All tokenmaxing to the max on Claude