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Meta caps internal AI token spending

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11–20 of 162 posts

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#14
post #8

I’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.

I'd guess through LLM embedded PoC projects.

You can rack up token consumption extremely quickly when you embed LLMs into automated processes or products.

I'd be very surprised if these numbers are just typical coding usage with no scripting/pipeline/automation stuff

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#15
post #8

I’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.

One thing I find fascinating as a software engineer who talks to non software engineers who use AI tools is how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem. What I mean is that uploading a PDF into a chatbot tool seems to be an extraordinarily obvious use case that non technical (and technical) users would want to do.

IMO claude, chatgpt/codex, etc should be able to optimize the PDF use case to be extremely token efficient as it's a very obvious use case. But when I start to explain to my wife/friends why it burns through so much quota, I find myself thinking "why should they have to understand this aspect of it". to me, that the details of PDF parsing and extracting are relevant to users (instead of solved such that you don't have to pay attention to it) shows how these tools are not nearly as "ready" as they are made out to be. I may be preaching to the choir on this one, but just my 2c

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#16
post #3

"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?

Now come on, there was a recent post where the author argued that infallible management knew this would happen, but was part of the double-secret-probation strategy to get the cogs to finally start using AI.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#17
Not surprising. It seems that the comment section of every coding agent thread has at least one person mentioning they use "tokenmaxxing" to increase their token usage because it was brought up during their quarterly review, at a standup, or some other communique from on high.

Just wonder what happens when more and more companies introduce similar restrictions. Will that lead to devaluations of the LLM companies?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#18

measure outcomes (impact), not effort (token usage, lines of code, code coverage, hours worked, etc.)

What outcomes though? The ones I’ve seen posted are still nonsensical metrics that a publicly traded firm absolutely doesn’t care about.

It wants to see faster R&D, higher revenues from existing assets, greater operating margins, higher sales to invested capital ratio and so on…

The best way to measure that for a software firm is up-time of services, usage and project completion duration

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#20
post #15
post #8

I’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.

One thing I find fascinating as a software engineer who talks to non software engineers who use AI tools is how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem. What I mean is that uploading a PDF into a chatbot tool seems to be an extraordinarily obvious use case that non technical (and technical) users would want to do. IMO claude, chatgpt/codex, etc should be able to optimize the PDF use case to be extremely token…

I hope someday we can get out of this local maxima of PDF documents. The format is terrible, but was right place, right time and might be impossible to dislodge.
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