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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

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Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#121

Post by turzmo »

99954bb63ccc wrote: post #108
izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is goi…

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#122

Post by bachmeier »

rr808 wrote: post #112

I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.

> Burns through tokens like water.

Pretty sure I know what you're saying, but the visual on this one doesn't match the point you're making.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#123

Post by Groxx »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #87
irishcoffee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not far off, getting the same seamless integration as hosted models is a full time job. I think what just happened is that devops is about to explode. What will naturally follow is local hosting of all the things when people realize subscription costs for cloud-whatever are absurd. Gitlab is going to take off? This is not investment advice.

> What will naturally follow is local hosting of all the things when people realize subscription costs for cloud-whatever are absurd. Even acknowledging we don't know exactly what costs would look like in a world without VC money, wouldn't hosting models logically be cheaper to do at scale in a data center? When I compared to the cost of running DeepSeek locally, I meant that we can treat that cost as a price ceiling…

Like how server hosting at scale in a datacenter is cheaper than running your own datacenter? Despite ~every company consistently concluding that hosting their own stuff is several multiples cheaper?

No, I think local stuff using also-useful-for-other-things hardware will vastly undercut cloud hosting when the free money pipeline shuts down, and will stay that way for roughly forever. That doesn't mean cloud stuff isn't useful, clearly it is, but adding another company in the middle is rarely the solution for reducing costs.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#124

Post by strathmeyer »

mrkeen wrote: post #68

I always used to wonder this about software stacks even prior to LLMs, but it seems more relevant now somehow: When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years. They match drivers to passengers. More software isn't going to increase the chance that I seek them out instead of taking a bus or train. Will their software be finished in 20 years? 80?

[dead]

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#125

Post by tpolm »

SoftTalker wrote: post #102
goldenarm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the codebase is custom integrations for local markets. You can systematize some of it but most of the complexity comes from there.

Can you provide an example? What is different about running Uber services in Chicago vs. Indianapolis?

Vegas: ordering a tax "to a hotel" - hotels have different entrances, pickup / dropoff there during crazy times is hard. Uber UI for Vegas is unique / some features are designed to make it easier for driver and passanger to find each other

Airports: different regulations, different rules for pickup/dropoff. Also scammers who pretend to be in a car, walk with their phones around pick-up ares in airport and do bait-and-switch (saw that in Istanbul SAW and in Dubai Al Maktoum)

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#126

Post by mchusma »

I actually do think token maxing is good, but they should have limited it per user. I find it reallly hard to get people to max out the Claude $100 plan, let alone the $200 plan. I understand the enterprise plans are different and more expensive, which is how you get these kinds of issues. But encouraging people to try things with AI is very important, and some amount of token maxing is importsnt.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#127

Post by HDThoreaun »

crorella wrote: post #53

Tokenmaxxing makes no sense, it is akin to write extremely inefficient SQL / Spark Jobs, full of cartesian joins, ultra skewed datasets, etc, just for the sake of using as much compute / memory / IO as possible. This always happens when the metric becomes the goal, companies should nurture and foster an environment where AI is used in the most efficient way possible, first asking "do we really need an agent for this"…

Tokenmaxxing exists because executives think employees are resistant to change. Thats it, a way to incentivize/force every employee to experiment with a new technology. Obviously once they think everyone is utilizing AI the tokkenmaxxing stuff will end.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#128

Post by Mtinie »

this_user wrote: post #31
chihuahua wrote: post #12

It's amazing that it took months to figure this out. "Well we thought that if engineers are told to maximize costs through AI use, to consume as much as possible of a resource that costs us money, then obviously good things will happen. Imagine my surprise when it didn't turn out that way." Imagine if engineers were ranked based on their AWS spend. People allocate VMs and fill databases with terabytes of random bits,…

The point of this was always to explore what is possible with AI as quickly as possible. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of waste, but the 5-10% of employees who are truly thinking about it and discovering novel applications are what you are truly after. Because right now, you effectively have a giant, as of yet poorly explored space of potential uses. Anyone who can find the actually valuable portions of the s…

[dead]

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#130

Post by tquinn35 »

mchusma wrote: post #126

I actually do think token maxing is good, but they should have limited it per user. I find it reallly hard to get people to max out the Claude $100 plan, let alone the $200 plan. I understand the enterprise plans are different and more expensive, which is how you get these kinds of issues. But encouraging people to try things with AI is very important, and some amount of token maxing is importsnt.

Who’s it important for?
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