Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

12gramsofcarbon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 315 posts

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#91

Post by ab71e5 »

aurareturn wrote: post #2

Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way. For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not. No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was alway…

Did not read the twitter thread but I think it is a mix of some companies with above strategy and most others just cargo culting

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#92

Post by theahura »

EGreg wrote: post #71

I don’t think people who write these headlines understand that “long live the king” used to refer to the next king. Where is the next tokenmaxxing?

(its in the article, which predicts that there will be another round of tokenmaxxing with different underlying incentives)

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#93

Post by hansmayer »

aurareturn wrote: post #2

Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way. For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not. No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was alway…

[dead]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#94

Post by hansmayer »

SR2Z wrote: post #46
baconmania wrote: post #8

The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.

I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…

[dead]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#95

Post by [deleted] »

Arainach wrote: post #88
SR2Z wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…

> the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting They don't. They want some metric to support what they want to do and don't care about good metrics at all. I've spent the vast majority of my career in FAANGs and it's been the pattern everywhere. Right now my org has a senior director who is constantly battering managers to tell their reports to fill out the weekly surveys. Why…

[deleted]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#96

Post by HDThoreaun »

agentultra wrote: post #90
HDThoreaun wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic of trusting employees who are worried that power tools will replace them to utilize power tools effectively is completely backwards in any sane world. People don’t like change, sometimes it needs to be forced on them.

Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.

I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#97

Post by ryandrake »

aurareturn wrote: post #2

Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way. For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not. No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was alway…

> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough.

If my productivity is in line with their expectations, I don’t understand why management cares what tools I’m using to do it. No employer ever told me to use emacs instead of vi, even though I’m 10x more productive in one vs the other. So why all of a sudden does management need to micromanage my tools?

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#98

Post by hmry »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #26
linsomniac wrote: post #4

>I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good. Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay. We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollar…

> database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland consider me officially triggered

why name your servers db-us-east-2 and web-de-stuttgart-3 when they could be called grindelwald and silkeborg?

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#99

Post by matheusmoreira »

cyphar wrote: post #56
linsomniac wrote: post #4

>I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good. Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay. We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollar…

I'm also taken aback with how naive folks are about companies, they really seem to have bought the whole "capitalism is efficient" maxim hook, line, and sinker. I really struggle to imagine how anyone in a corporate environment has managed to never run into obvious examples of waste like you describe (overpaid consultants and mandatory budgets are classic examples). Office Space came out 27 years ago and has a plotli…

> "capitalism is efficient"

The precondition for that is competition. If some company has idiot managers that waste resources on idiotic things, they're supposed to be wiped out by the companies that are actually smart.

Capitalism requires constant evolutionary pressure and a sort of government directed corporation level eugenics program to constantly apply that pressure in order to function properly. Without that, it's just distributed fascism.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#100

Post by seattle_spring »

et1337 wrote: post #77

Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training from the people saying these things, and one of their few helpful concrete recommendations was to constantly clear context all the time, to avoid things going off the rails. However, I think findi…

> I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training

wow! That sounds like an unbelievable grift. Who were they such that anyone could possibly think that's a worthwhile investment?

Post reply on HN