Meta caps internal AI token spending • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#141

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

kjellsbells wrote: post #104

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…

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 th…

bingo. 90% of our AI use cases across the company are things like this. security and ops (NOC/SOC folks) use this almost as much as they do for technical stuff.

hell we have restrictive rules for security stuff so in many cases our network engineers are still doing by hand configs for critical systems.

but in terms of token use it's gotta be "take this pdf and parse these 3 columns into 2" or similar

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#142

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

MangoCoffee wrote: post #95

giancarlostoro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point "Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports" https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computi...

That's fair, I guess still having that sort of leaderboard is a foolish way to burn a billion dollars.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#143

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #97

morpheos137 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is about silicon valley leaders not understanding basic economics or business management? These kind of cargo cult tactics would not fly in any other industry.

These kind of cargo cult tactics show up in all kinds of businesses. But yeah, it's like they've never actually met human beings...

Give an example.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#144

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #47

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?

> Who could possibly have predicted that happening? Everyone except the executives who get paid millions to predict exactly that.

presumably they covered this in the boilerplate MBA courses they took, non?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#145

Post by butlike » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

spindump8930 wrote: post #63

tyre wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone needing to do this, the answer is to convert it to an image first. Far smaller, LLMs work well with them (even in some pretty insane use cases I've seen), and, along with human review, it can be a huge productivity gain that results in structured data.

I agree with your recomendation, but converting a pdf to an image is by no means smaller. PDFs are much closer to SVGs then to jpegs.

Why can't I just take a screenshot of the PDF and feed that into the llm?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#146

Post by butlike » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

4yfr wrote: post #38

Loughla wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kinda. The answer is simpler on the surface: focus. Generally the problem is the larger the firm’s operations, the harder it is to focus. Apple is the only firm that has done well on this consistently and doesn’t have a huge grave yard of failures to show for it.

PUBLIC graveyard

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#147

Post by JeremyNT » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

wpasc wrote: post #37

mattnewton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree with you, but every non-engineer I know using these tools 100% will drag and drop a PDF into a chatbot. Anthropic and OpenAI as companies who are selling their products to all sorts of businesses should have a much better means of handling this nightmare of a format because it is so pervasive and so obviously what so many of their customers are going to drop into the product.

> I agree with you, but every non-engineer I know using these tools 100% will drag and drop a PDF into a chatbot

I'm an engineer and use my coding agent to deal with PDFs all the time. It can reach for unix tools if it needs them.

I don't think I understand why this is a problem - it uses tokens, but it removes drudgery. This is the entire promise of the technology.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#148

Post by butlike » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

jm4 wrote: post #99

bdcravens wrote: post #49

And I still can't exhaust the limits on my Claude Max subscription, despite being more productive than I've ever been in terms of real work (ie, things that actually make money)

For real. I've used 8B tokens in the past month and haven't hit my limits even once. In fact, I can't even get close except for the day I used Fable. I've barely stopped. Claude keeps reminding me to sleep.

Jesus. 8B tokens in a _month_? Do you even think at all anymore?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#149

Post by jdlshore » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

unknownfuture wrote: post #140

jdlshore wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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

It’s been true for a long time. One of the hardest things as a senior leader in software is dealing with people demanding “accountability” (by which they mean making long-term plans with impossibly precise forecasts) and focusing on costs, all while ignoring value and refusing to engage in prioritization. (I swear, if I hear “it’s all important” again…)

People are just… shallow. They operate on feelings and vibes. They follow the herd without thinking critically. Then they get angry when their dreams clash with reality, and they blame the messenger when those dreams turn out to be fantasies.

But you’re right. AI is bringing out the worst in these tendencies. I think it’s because it’s so convincing when you don’t dig deeply, or aren’t an expert in the subject being discussed. On the plus side, it raises the floor, but I think we’re in for some difficult times before the lessons are learned. I don’t think it will take long, though: I suspect that naive use of AI is going to massively speed up the technical debt curve, and where it used to take 5-9 years to destroy a codebase, it will now take closer to 1-2.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#150

Post by butlike » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

stinkbeetle wrote: post #94

jazzyjackson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a positive return on token spend they wouldn’t be capping it now would they?

That does not follow. Many things have diminishing returns curves.

Yes, but a curve trends to zero. A cap is a step function to zero. I think they're saying there's no point in removing those diminishing return gains if there's still positive value to be had.