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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

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Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#111

Post by bluefirebrand »

aurareturn wrote: post #109
ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Your productivity isn’t in line with their expectations. Maybe your immediate manager but not the executives. That’s why they are doing it.

Their expectations aren't based in reality so I'm not sure why anyone should care

Edit: I mean besides the obvious of "because they will fire you if you don't care"

But idk. They're aiming to fire me eventually and have AI do 100% of my job so meh. Fire me now instead of later.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#112

Post by satvikpendem »

cyphar wrote: post #50
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…

Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. (Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold…

Because people don't know what they want until they have and use it. Faster horses, etc. One can only really implement systemic change from the top down, as Moloch indicates.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#114

Post by agentultra »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #108
agentultra wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.

Well here’s where you can level valid complaints against management I think. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t line up super well with “wait for empirical studies to back up your suspicions”

For sure. Just because the studies are incomplete or difficult doesn’t mean they’re useless. We still do unit testing and type systems continue to get more sophisticated and spread further because we believe they have an effect on quality and productivity regardless of the lack of evidence.

However it takes some taste in engineering and perhaps some mathematical sophistication to figure these things out. “Just use AI,” is not a very convincing argument either.

It’ll take time to sort out, I wager.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#115

Post by jdiff »

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 they see productivity gains that they're now calibrating for? Why have these productivity gains not been reflected externally in any measurable way?

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#117

Post by jdiff »

aurareturn wrote: post #20
witx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're naive, uninformed or turfing if you think companies are still not tokenmaxxing. Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers

Yes, and Uber was trying to recuperate what investments in data centers? Come on now. Let's not think that we are all smarter than management at these companies.

Let us also not think that management is any smarter than any of us and is playing 5D chess games we couldn't comprehend. Notably, games that they also could not articulate when they were making these decisions.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#118

Post by jdiff »

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…

Even modern frontier models benefit so hugely from careful context pruning, maintenance, and rewriting to erase mistakes that it's astonishing to me that there are no tools centered around it. The one tool that used to have such a feature, Zed and its retroactively-named Text Threads, has now stripped itself of it.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#119

Post by lazide »

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…

I worked at FAANG. If anything, people are not nearly skeptical enough about how dumb it is with all this going on.

People are (in this analogy) building sawdust farms there.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#120

Post by animuchan »

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…

This is probably the most charitable explanation humanly possible.

Surely for this specific example of managerial stupidity it just is, but I mean more generally, it's a beautiful posting.

I aspire to have this much misplaced belief in any humans at all, let alone CEOs.

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