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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

#241

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #199
KaiserPro wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights" Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but a…

> we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain This is really relative to the size of that innovation, isn't it? > Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights" This is exactly how startups and…

It's how it does work, often.

It's not how it should work, because food fights are stupid and have no upside.

Even if everyone else is having them.

It's not a fair analogy because AI isn't completely stupid, and there are situations where it does provide a benefit.

But a rational business would ask if the upside is worth the cost, if the pipeline can be restructured to concentrate and amplify the benefits, if some elements are better being done the old way, if there are strategic threats if tokens become much more expensive, and so on.

Instead we're getting a wave of "Cut workers, cut costs, derp" and that's as far as the "thinking" goes.

The worst thing about AI is that it shows how shallow and stupid current C-suites are.

The US used to have real tech visionaries. Now it has tech cargo cultists, all chasing an IPO cash out and hoping the music doesn't stop before they get their bag.

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

#242

Post by OptionOfT »

toasty228 wrote: post #208
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 bott…

Problem is that those 20% depend on the code reviews of the 80% for some form of pushback.

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

#243

Post by [deleted] »

dgellow wrote: post #224
arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP (solenoid0937) is an unfounded AI-hype peddler and an Anthropic shill (check their comment history), do not expect them to provide an actual example of their wild claims.

I checked their history and they seem alright ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[deleted]

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

#244

Post by brikil »

symfoniq wrote: post #106
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

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…

It should not be overlooked that a lot of this fervor is from investors/board members putting pressure on these companies.

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

#246

Post by pmg101 »

roxolotl wrote: post #30
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 inability of leaders to understand Goodhart’s Law is always a sight to behold. They see a number go up and pat themselves on the back for how well their employees are making it go up without ever wondering if the thing they care about is happening.

This is one explanation, sure.

Isn't it more likely that they simply don't in fact care about the "thing they care about", only the metric?

They can plot the metric on a chart and receive praise, so that's what they're interested in.

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

#247

Post by robocat »

chowells wrote: post #206
robocat wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> goal of an economic system

A goal fails - who sets a goal? The keyword is system.

An economic system needs something like a Nash equilibrium where defectors are sufficiently discouraged (and cooperators are rewarded as you imply). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

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

#248

Post by skt5 »

Aurornis wrote: post #178
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

> and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity I participate in some management-focused online communities. It’s crazy how many threads there are from frustrated managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance. I think a few dumb companies did this and then it spread across social media, triggering a mass panic from engineers afraid thei…

> I participate in some management-focused online communities.

I know - slightly off topic - but would you be willing to share this list?

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

#249

Post by comfysocks »

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…

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.

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

#250

Post by solenoid0937 »

dgellow wrote: post #75
solenoid0937 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "amazing that it took months to figure this out" as if the answer to the question is obvious. But it's not. Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Other companies have no clue what to do with tokens, they've just told their engineers to max them. It really depends on how you're using the tokens . If you're just using them for Codex and Claude Code - yeah, tokenmaxxing is incredibly dumb.

Where can I see those amazing things done by FAANGs?

Join one!
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