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Meta caps internal AI token spending

mlq.ai

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#131
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?

My company has an AI leaderboard and ONE ranking to be this, AND OTHER rankings like efficiency (loc merged per token). No one is so stupid that they think any single one of this is to be optimized (gamed) for.

Tech journalists have low opinion of people with actual skills who actually contribute to society, and when their opinions get posted here, it's often selectively echoed by people looking for a reason to feel smarter than the industry.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#132
The most interesting number is missing here, and that is the token distribution by use case. If 60-70% was eaten up by PDFs, agents and automation instead of people actually sitting in Claude Code, then it is a completely different story

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#133

Ok I’ll ask since nobody else has — are they not giving their devs a Claude code max or Codex Pro subscription? If so, why is token cost approaching billions? And if not, why not?

They can't. The subscriptions are for personal use not enterprise. i.e. [1] "This article is about paid Max plans for individual consumers. If you're part of an organization looking to use Claude with your team, refer to Team and Enterprise Plans." [1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-...

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Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#134
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…

> how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem This and replies to this are surreal. It's like everyone simultaneously decided to forget that you don't need claude or whatever to read a PDF . The document is literally made for you to read...

> The document is literally made for you to read...

It’s disingenuous to assume every PDF is actually crafted to communicate to its recipients, even more so to pretend LLM users are in a position to understand all the PDFs they receive

There’s a lot of gray area where help understanding a document is fully reasonable

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#135
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A past employer thought it was a good idea to put up a leaderboard of who sent the most Slack messages. They celebrated the people at the top for being so active. Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line. The Slack leaderboar…

You have to realize that if you set a measure, you're actually setting a goal for your employees. There is no such thing as a meaningless metric; why else would you measure it? No amount of "this isn't used for anything" will change that. It's inherent in human nature in the 21st century to believe any and all metrics will be used against them, and therefore must be gamed. It's why you also have to set UNBELIEVABLY c…

I worked at a place that argued that nobody would game the metrics because it would be wrong and they never stated what the metrics were… while I was gaming the metrics and they were praising me for being one of the best on the team.

It was an unreal experience.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#137
post #126

Wasn’t this already reported on? FWIW this article links to primary sources from early last month https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta...

Fact is that I can actually read TFA, while your link is paywalled.

I mean… should you be able to? It looks like this is just an AI summarizing a bunch of other paywalled sources. It’s “by MLQ Agent”

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#138

2 week old news OP; Various discussions: Meta’s chaotic AI strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602571 Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461 Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708795

Had a similar comment but what’s even weirder and I seemed to have missed entirely at first glance is that this is an AI news aggregator agent?

The article is “by MLQ Agent.”

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. How? This is an org pushing thousands of PRs a day. How do you solve the attribution problem for any one engineer's work given some set of impact metrics? And keep in mind, most common impact metrics are trailing indicators, often over relative long time horizons.

As VPEng, I didn’t use metrics to assess individuals. Too prone to metric gaming. Instead, I had a career ladder with a detailed rubric describing the skills an engineer at each level was expected to have. (Including communication and peer-leadership skills.) Managers performed qualitative assessment of employees, using the career ladder as a guide. They relied on tech leads and Staff engineers to help them understan…

Right, so you're sane. :D

Unfortunately I think we're entering (have entered?) a period of insanity.

The trouble is AI is being sold as an individual engineering accelerant. I suspect at the most AI pilled orgs you'll then see a commensurate push that starts off with measuring usage (tokens), then measuring output (PRs, code reviews), and then a lot of talk about impact while everyone quietly admits that remains as impossible now as it was fifty years ago.

Why? Because leadership is looking to (and selling, both internally and to the market) AI as the solution to all of their problems, which means they have to prove outcomes that justify their sky high AI budgets.

Higher level metrics at the org/division/product/project level aren't satisfying and flashy enough as they're slow moving and attenuated.

And squishy individual or team level assessments that rely on strong management won't show well on a cost-benefit comparison chart to the board.

At bottom I suspect AI pilled leadership wants to turn software into an assembly line and measure accordingly. Your post perfectly captures why it's still not that easy, and that the real problems in software remains the same and are unsolved by AI: building the right thing, at the right time, and then later figuring out what went well, what didn't, and trying to make those successes more repeatable and failures less likely.

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