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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

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Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#231

Post by JoshTriplett »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #228
oblio wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? We couldn't build any of this stuff (rockets, LLMs, heart medicine) if the foundation was ill defined. I think it's the second time I run into you like this, Temporal. I wish HN had a way to classify you as an "AI booster" or…

> What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? Yes. There's a lot of interesting things science has to say about water, very specific claims that took a lot of effort to discover, precisely formulate, and reproduce. We're not talking about those. The whole LLM discussio…

> refuses to believe water is wet

At the risk of abusing the analogy further: many people aren't refusing to believe it's wet, they're observing that sulfuric acid is also "wet" and can look similar upon visual inspection, and there's a lot of harm coming along with the demonstrated capabilities, in addition to those capabilities themselves being fickle and inconsistent (not a desirable property for a good technology).

This isn't a problem of "doesn't know what AI can do"; yes, some people are misinformed, but you shouldn't dismiss all refusal to use AI as being misinformed. This is a problem of "knows what AI can do, and based on that informed position thinks it's terrible and should have careful guardrails around it".

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#232

Post by summa_tech »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #203
oblio wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.

Nature doesn't publish papers about water being wet either.

As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z

Scientists find more or less everything very interesting, even (especially?) things that are supposedly self-evident. You can both make a big splash disproving self-evident things, and much can be learned from it.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#233

Post by [deleted] »

VulgarExigency wrote: post #224
red_admiral wrote: post #101

> Like, imagine if some serious business leader, like, idk, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to announce that Meta was going to burn money. Like ... pivoting to the "metaverse" and changing the company name to show he's serious.

It's astounding to me that they looked at Second Life and really thought that was the future.

[deleted]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#234

Post by TeMPOraL »

oblio wrote: post #230
TeMPOraL wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What? The basic properties of water are scientifically defined as best we can. There is mathematical proof that 1+1=2. Do you think science starts from nuclear physics or differential equations? Yes. There's a lot of interesting things science has to say about water, very specific claims that took a lot of effort to discover, precisely formulate, and reproduce. We're not talking about those. The whole LLM discussio…

LLMs are useful. They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful, nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful. The way they are pushed right now will lead to a very hard crash and probably lots of suffering. Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p

> They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful

Why not? They're a general-purpose technology, in the same category as "software" or "electricity".

> nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful

They're potentially useful for anything that can be fed into computers (VLMs lifted the "that can be expressed as text" limitation, visual and audio tokens are not a separate category to text tokens anymore). That touches every single job people do in some aspects. Even though LLMs can't do physical work for people, they're still able to help with directing it and teaching it.

"Cramming into the throat of every employee on the planet" was already covered by many comments here, and the article itself - it's about forcing the obstinate holdouts to at least try.

> Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p

No I don't; literally copy-pasted it to Tampermonkey on my Firefox on Android just now, and it works there out-of-the-box too.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#235

Post by ligne »

SR2Z wrote: post #142
cyphar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? I mean, the difference in the metaphor is that we have pretty fully understood carpentry for many hundreds of years. We still find it difficult to write even simple software to address all our needs, as is evidenced by the insan…

Have you considered using a more scientific metric, like the number of bugs being closed or the number of typewriter ribbons being used up?

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#237

Post by hylaride »

SR2Z wrote: post #143
bitwize wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you actually have a job? Do you talk to your coworkers? This is an insane take. Plenty of people are critical of AI at my job despite a big push to use it. I find the comparison to NK distasteful, coming from someone who presumably is pretty well paid and can quit their job whenever they want. If you're feeling humiliated... well, I don't think it's because your boss wants you to try AI.

Narcissists, non-violent sociopaths, and control freaks end up in managerial positions (often more likely than the general population). The pointy haired boss in Dilbert is a popular representation for a reason. We've all been subject to degrading and/or stupid management trends (see also: https://ibb.co/Kx46rqkg ), and while in the tech industry we had a golden age were the engineer was king, that's been chipped away even before AI became mainstream. Also, hyperbole is a thing. :-)

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#238

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Lutger wrote: post #218
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.

And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution. People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.

> not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences

Sure. Many have not. I’m thinking of stuff like ox-drawn and then mechanized ploughs, four- versus three-crop rotation, et cetera. The point is there is pushback regardless of benefit and even after it’s been demonstrated. Plenty of people are fine being comfortable. Which is fine. But it also explains why companies and societies with a nudge feature do better.

> if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway

Again, sure. If it’s their land, it gets acquired. If it’s your land they’re tilling, you get a say.

I’m not saying all-nor even most—pushback is unfounded. Just that there are plenty of cases where it is, and the solution there is to push through the change.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#239

Post by manicennui »

animuchan wrote: post #120
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.

I doubt the author of the article even believes it. The article is an ad for their services which just happen to be "helping" companies use AI.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#240

Post by manicennui »

ambicapter wrote: post #131

> That’s no longer true. We’ve entered a different regime, where spending more tokens generally results in better results. We call this “compounding correctness” — the more tokens you spend on getting a task correct, the more likely you’ll get a good outcome. We talked about this a bit at the last in person Agentics meetup: Have we? Is it generally the case that the more tokens you spend, you better results you get?…

Did you read the article?

"Most teams haven’t yet figured out how to build their own Ramp Inspect or Stripe Minions (if that’s you, reach out — we can help!) but basically everyone is at least using cursor in the side bar."

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