Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 360 posts

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#151

Post by sandeepkd »

repeekad wrote: post #77
lorecore wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).

Every c suite in the country is panicking about being left behind, from their perspective it’s either token max or fade into obscurity, or at least that’s what they were sold

its a herd mentality, its a lot easier to follow the louder voices than to spend time understanding how it impacts your own particular business. Because google does this way, or apple does this way is a common argument in lot of feature/business decisions

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#152

Post by AlotOfReading »

goldenarm wrote: post #85
mrkeen wrote: post #68

I always used to wonder this about software stacks even prior to LLMs, but it seems more relevant now somehow: When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years. They match drivers to passengers. More software isn't going to increase the chance that I seek them out instead of taking a bus or train. Will their software be finished in 20 years? 80?

Most of the codebase is custom integrations for local markets. You can systematize some of it but most of the complexity comes from there.

Sure, but custom integrations seem unlikely to explain the majority of Uber's technical headcount. Let's say they average a dedicated engineer for each of their 1000 largest markets/locations. Let's assume another 200 across the countless smaller markets. Let's assume 50% overhead atop this for things like infra, tools, and management. These all seem like exceedingly generous estimates to me.

They actually had 5,000 engineers in the tokenmaxxing blog post. That's a lot of engineers for the rest of Uber's business activities.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#153

Post by tmaly »

rr808 wrote: post #112

I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.

[dead]

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#154

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

trollbridge wrote: post #146
mchusma wrote: post #126

I actually do think token maxing is good, but they should have limited it per user. I find it reallly hard to get people to max out the Claude $100 plan, let alone the $200 plan. I understand the enterprise plans are different and more expensive, which is how you get these kinds of issues. But encouraging people to try things with AI is very important, and some amount of token maxing is importsnt.

Man, it sure isn’t hard for me to max it out.

It's not hard for most people now. 6 months ago when agents first started getting big, I genuinely didn't know enough about AI tools to understand how it was possible to use so many tokens, and I don't think I would have bothered to find time to learn without a kick.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#155

Post by tquinn35 »

loeg wrote: post #138
tquinn35 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s it important for?

The business. Employees are hesitant to learn new tools that are very different from what they are used to, so if your business believes that AI is a productivity multiplier, it behooves it to incentivize individual employees to learn to use the tool.

I think the key word is “believes”. There is no proof that AI usage improves productivity. Token maxing is essentially customers paying to try and prove a business’s unsubstantiated claim. The AI companies should be proving their claims themselves not the other way around.

I do think AI has value and is useful but the idea of token maxing is ridiculous.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#156

Post by matheusmoreira »

LLMs are great, I can understand using them in general. I can even understand chasing 100% weekly usage if you're using the gacha-like subscriptions since that's how you get the most value out of what you paid for.

The way these corporations are going about it is completely insane though. They're essentially ordering their employees to set money on fire or be fired themselves. The more money you burn on tokens at insane API rates, the better an employee you are. Absolutely mind boggling.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#157

Post by delichon »

There is little new under the big fusion reactor in the sky. I just read a chapter in James Glieck's "The Information" about tokenmaxxing in the telegraphy industry. There used to be a big market for code books to reduce the per-character charges for sending telegrams. Compression was cash in the pocket. The telegraph companies discouraged the practice but were forced to accept it. The telegraph code industry started with the initial commercialization of telegraphy and didn't end until the 1920s.

There was a cost to it though. Codes greatly reduced redundancy, and caused large miscommunications from very small errors. As Glieck explains it, this was the opposite of the African drumming practice of adding redundancy to strengthen the relationship between the rhythm and the language that the drums mimic.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#158

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

steveBK123 wrote: post #32
solenoid0937 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "amazing that it took months to figure this out" as if the answer to the question is obvious. But it's not. Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Other companies have no clue what to do with tokens, they've just told their engineers to max them. It really depends on how you're using the tokens . If you're just using them for Codex and Claude Code - yeah, tokenmaxxing is incredibly dumb.

> Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Others have no clue what to do with tokens. Unlimited tokens is different from “use AI a lot or we will fire you, and we are counting token consumption as usage”. Obviously the latter is stupid and yet it was done in many places.

I'm not convinced it actually was done in many places, although I understand why in a bad job market people don't trust that it isn't happening in secret. Every time I've heard of a token leaderboard or such it's come with a denial that the company is using it as an employee performance metric.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#159

Post by KaiserPro »

loeg wrote: post #141
abvdasker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.

Meta tracks token consumption, but has explicitly stated that it is not a primary performance metric. Instead, employees are evaluated on "impact."

Indeed, they also said that previous time off for ill health wasn't a reason either.

but looking at the number of people who had taken leave, it suggests otherwise.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#160

Post by nradov »

pera wrote: post #113
devin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who have ascended to leadership positions are deeply divorced from reality. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

They get paid for saying whatever VCs want to hear and now that thing is "we have now become an AI-native company". The thing I'm still trying to understand is who is scamming whom

Uber is publicly traded. They're not beholden to VCs any more.
Post reply on HN