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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

#201

Post by dmazzoni »

I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource.

I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight.

For a while, I would even build internal services that were basically "free" because I'd just run them all at priority 0.

Over time those services got less and less reliable as overall usage started to increase, so I was forced to either justify the resources or scale back - but that was a good thing.

I feel like something similar would be a good model for AI token use: big tech companies ought to have their own self-hosted LLM data centers to power their own needs, then let employees use off-hours capacity to experiment.

Outside of experimentation, we should be encouraging token efficiency for everyday tasks. Rather than having a certain number of tokens, engineers should be evaluated based on how much they actually get done.

Using a lot of tokens to automate a process that used to require hours of human labor every week? Good use of tokens, should be encouraged.

Using a lot of tokens to debug an easy frontend bug that could have been fixed by hand, and still took you 4 hours to complete? Waste of tokens, should be discouraged.

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

#202

Post by vasco »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #173
symfoniq wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here: First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative…

> A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases

A lot of monkeys will also eventually type up Shakespeare?

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

#203

Post by loeg »

Aurornis wrote: post #179
abvdasker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.

Do you have any source for this at all? I’ve seen so many different exonerations for Meta’s layoff criteria including claims that engineers using the most AI were laid off because Meta had them build AI tools to replace themselves. Everyone is oddly confident despite all of the conflicting explanations.

Without any evidence, I would be shocked if performance rating wasn't a factor in the layoffs. But performance rating is not the same thing as AI tool use.

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

#204

Post by levhawk »

On token consumption and efficiency... AI-champion guy in my prev company made a metric, like how many tokens are spend per line of generated code, and even put a leaderboard based on that metric, praising guys with the cheapest LOC.

For me that's insanity for so many reasons...

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

#205

Post by steveBK123 »

throwaw12 wrote: post #183
duxup wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that). They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

Problem is in management, management usually comes up non-sense metric when they themselves lack of good metric. For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like: * let's figure out together * industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter ...

Because the higher up you go in management, the more "strategy" is a Plato's Cave like interpretation of what better/bigger/whatever competitors are doing.

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

#206

Post by chowells »

robocat wrote: post #182
swed420 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.

Go ahead and start from the small and grow it bigger: you could become a billionaire if you succeed.

Hahahaha....

What if the goal of an economic system was to support everyone instead of maximizing the upside for winners? Perhaps that's the sort of change necessary for improvement. Perhaps having billionaires is the failure state.

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

#207

Post by amluto »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #86

"He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features." He's saying that like it's some grand epiphany and not the most self-evident, obvious thing I've heard this month. Some of the literal dumbest people on earth are in charge of these major companies.

This is also Uber we’re talking about. The company that famously developed a massively engineered ledger to track every event across the entire company, globally consistently, forever, in a single database. This definitely adds enormous value to the bottom line!

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

#208

Post by toasty228 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34

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.

You'd be surprised, I know a few devs in very big tech companies, not faang but you definitely know them, and they all have some kind of token leaderboards, a few told their dev "we don't want you to write a single line of code manually anymore", etc.

I assume the execs perspective is something like: if the top 20% of worker produce 80% of the code with LLMs and the company still works then we can get rid of the bottom 80% of devs and save money

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

#209

Post by nickvec »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34

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.

I worked at Uber from 2022-2025. The engineering culture was pretty abysmal, so it checks out.
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