Meta caps internal AI token spending • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#101

Post by cadamsdotcom » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #88

simonw wrote: 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?

I still don't understand how Mark Zuckerberg has any serious investors, he went on this AI tangent and has absolutely nothing to show for it, despite FB / Meta having built some key tech in the space. He needs to stop trying to do something "different" and literally try and build a serious coding agent he can sell, he could have probably had something worthwhile in that space by now. He started being drastically more…

Haven’t got numbers so I might be wrong, but I suspect it is dwarfed by the present size and future potential of Meta’s ads business.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#102

Post by what » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

ryanschaefer wrote: post #61

simonw wrote: 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?

It’s funny how many times the same thing happens at each large company. I think people’s thought process is this: > Oh wow! If I paid for this myself I would have spent a lot of money! Are other people spending as much as me? I’m going to create a leaderboard! > Oh no, my misinformed manager is using the leaderboard as a slight of hand for work. I need to game this now. Then the leaderboard is banned… I can’t see how…

There is zero chance that this is how the leaderboards came to be.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#103

Post by georgeburdell » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

dwoosley wrote: 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.

Anecdotally it's true for me. I can code all day with an agent and never went above $50, but the second I need to ingest a pdf doc to figure out a command I need to use it's easily $20-30 for 10 mins of work

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#104

Post by kjellsbells » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:13 AM UTC

wpasc wrote: post #15

dwoosley wrote: 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…

Amen. Normal office work is wildly different from what we read about on HN. If you were a CEO, determined to lay off all your people, you would want to really zero in on having your AI solve these very unsexy problems: extract data from Office and PDF. Grab data from some part of the screen of a webapp and parse it. drive a line of business app via keyboard or mouse simulation. I know there are companies out there that try, eg Appian and (here in YC) Skyvern, but its a hard problem and yet I feel this is where the true money is.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#105

Post by ryanschaefer » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:16 AM UTC

what wrote: post #102

ryanschaefer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how many times the same thing happens at each large company. I think people’s thought process is this: > Oh wow! If I paid for this myself I would have spent a lot of money! Are other people spending as much as me? I’m going to create a leaderboard! > Oh no, my misinformed manager is using the leaderboard as a slight of hand for work. I need to game this now. Then the leaderboard is banned… I can’t see how…

There is zero chance that this is how the leaderboards came to be.

What makes you assert that?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#106

Post by andsoitis » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #69

wpasc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

measuring uptime? I've seen Anthropic's status page, and they are a >$1 Trillion dollar company who "largely solved" coding. so clearly you aren't correct. /s

Ok, uptime. How do you measure an individual’s contribution to uptime? If Claude goes down does everyone take a hit? If Claude stays up everyone gets rewarded? If so, your metric cannot distinguish between a bad engineer and a good one. If not, you have the same problem you started with: measuring contributions to “uptime”.

> If so, your metric cannot distinguish between a bad engineer and a good one.

A metric that moves in the same direction and amount for everyone based on external event isn’t a problem. The delta in performance of the great engineer will outweigh that of the poor, since the metric movement that is due to external circumstances will be the same in each kind of engineer and thus not count.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#107

Post by Atotalnoob » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

felix-the-cat wrote: post #39

Within a few weeks of telling people at our company that if they don’t use AI they will be replaced by someone who does, they just announced that their allocation with ChatGPT has reset and are now panicking as they blew through their million token allocation for this month in under six hours - you can’t make this shit up.

A million tokens is like $15 with SOTA models… that’s their allocation?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#108

Post by andsoitis » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #45

andsoitis wrote: post #12

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

> measure outcomes (impact) This is also not easy. In particular proactively preventing bugs is not rewarded

> In particular proactively preventing bugs is not rewarded

The main way I think you can proactively prevent bugs in a meaningful way is by crafting and propagating better architecture.

Better (or worse) architecture and adoption of it can be measured through a mix of quantitative and qualitative means so those metrics could be used to evaluate the impact of the engineer driving that architecture.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#109

Post by schmuhblaster » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #27

wpasc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because PDFs are a nightmare of a format and the only thing that’s is reasonably guaranteed about them is they will render to an image that people can read, the parsing of which will be much less token efficient than the equivalent text