141–150 of 360 posts
If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company. No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.
Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.
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
There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation. True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing. We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everyt…
If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.
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?
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Weren’t they trying to do their own self-driving thing? I think this is partly a problem with companies that have had heavy investment. Uber’s value isn’t based on what they are doing, it is based on the idea that they are going to render ideas like owning your own car or taking public transit obsolete (I mean that’s an exaggeration but less of one than it ought to be).
AFAIK they gave up on doing self-driving themselves a while ago. I'm sure they are still hoping to be able to get rid of human drivers somehow.
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.
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.
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The people who have ascended to leadership positions are deeply divorced from reality. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).
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Can you provide an example? What is different about running Uber services in Chicago vs. Indianapolis?
For example in Seattle you pay county fees, and then state fees, and then maybe special fees if you were picked up in the airport. I took a ride from SEATAC to my hotel in downtown Seattle and besides the ride itself, there were 5 other items on the bill, 4 of which are specific to the place I used Uber. Then I had the return trip from my hotel to SEATAC, on this one I got EIGHT items on the bill, on top of the ride…
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.
I find it useful that if they cut the use altogether I will pay for it out of pocket.
Probably long term each dev gets their own GPU and runs a model locally I expect. Seems like a more sustainable approach, even if a local model is not absolute SOTA.