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

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

#181

Post by onesociety2022 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #96
crorella wrote: post #53

Tokenmaxxing makes no sense, it is akin to write extremely inefficient SQL / Spark Jobs, full of cartesian joins, ultra skewed datasets, etc, just for the sake of using as much compute / memory / IO as possible. This always happens when the metric becomes the goal, companies should nurture and foster an environment where AI is used in the most efficient way possible, first asking "do we really need an agent for this"…

The argument in favor of "tokenmaxxing" has always been that it's creating space for employees to freely explore the broad and novel space of AI-enabled workflows. I've seen a number of use cases where I'm skeptical any value is being produced, but a number of others where some team or another has finally solved a long-standing problem of theirs with an agentic workflow that would have been hard to justify to a cost…

+1 I find the general disdain for C-suite or senior engineering leadership on HN so silly. These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved. Yes, some of them are sheep and will blindly copy what is fashionable but so do a large swath of ICs.

If you want incredibly fast adoption of AI within a company, the best thing you can do is to signal from the top that tokenmaxxing will be rewarded (or at least not be punished for it).

1. It forces everyone including the lazy ones who normally wouldn't invest their time in learning anything new to actually install codex/claude and learn to use them.

2. It prevents any middle manager from putting up blockers for adoption/experimentation ("this is new, I don't trust this, let's do it the old familiar way", "this might be expensive, we care about efficiency here", etc). Once the C-suite dictates tokenmaxxing is allowed, every middle manager will fall in line instantly.

3. Tokenmaxxing is not choice you have to live with the rest of your life. A year or two from now, once C-suite is satisfied with the rate of AI adoption within their org/company, they can just as easily switch the focus to efficiency. Teams will be asked to justify their token spend and start to optimize.

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

#182

Post by robocat »

swed420 wrote: post #120
Lalabadie wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're now in the last frame of the comic, getting thrown out the window.

Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.

Go ahead and start from the small and grow it bigger: you could become a billionaire if you succeed.

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

#183

Post by throwaw12 »

duxup wrote: post #176
symfoniq wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation. True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing. We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everyt…

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that). They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

Problem is in management, management usually comes up non-sense metric when they themselves lack of good metric.

For example, everyone talks about strategy, but when you ask them what's our strategy answer is usually something like:

* let's figure out together

* industry changing is so fast, we should revisit plans every quarter

...

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

#184

Post by overfeed »

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?

> When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years

I suppose it becomes easier once the browsers, Android and iOS have been frozen for a little longer than 16 years. Nevermind the changing regulatory field and new products (when was Uber Eats launched?).

In that 16-year period, Covid-19 emerged, as did viable self-driving and partnership with Waymo. A networked, people-facing app can't ever be "done", unless you have perfect prescience. Internal tech-stacks are a living thing: keeping a service that on the outside appears to be unchanging is a lot of work! Scaling is a lot of work! Scaling services and maintenance feed off each other.

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

#185

Post by mejutoco »

delichon wrote: post #157

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…

That is interesting but tokenmaxxing is not maximizing token usage _efficiency_. It is maximizing its usage.

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

#186

Post by throwaw12 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #173
symfoniq wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation. True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing. We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everyt…

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here: First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative…

> some innovation will arise

Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.

Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M

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

#187

Post by alexandre_m »

Limits are beneficial. They should be treated as a design feature, not just a stopgap.

When something is abundant, people tend to waste it.

I’m perfectly happy with my base subscriptions. I have Claude Code and Codex monthly subs, plus a yearly Google AI Pro account because it was a logical upgrade from the cloud storage plan I already had. I think it worked out to something like an extra $10/month for the AI features.

I constantly rotate between them during the week, managing tokens carefully, cleaning sessions and contexts as soon as possible, and being intentional about usage.

I honestly don’t understand the appeal of these ultra-expensive max subscriptions.

It reminds me of that flying orb toy I bought for the kids a few years ago. The battery only lasted about 10 minutes, and the kids would go ape shit crazy while it worked. Then it needed a 30-minute recharge, which created a natural cooldown period.

I actually considered that a good feature. I would never want the thing running nonstop.

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

#189

Post by deadbabe »

Protip: skunkworks type side projects are a great way to do tokenmaxxing when you don’t have enough work coming in, but still need to burn tokens to look productive. And because side projects are only governed by you, you can truly go nuts and let scope creep run wild. Soon enough, you’ll be one of those engineers burning six figures a month on AI and people will be in awe of your abilities, probably even elevating you to key AI evangelist positions within your company. And if you actually create something cool, you’ll be praised for your use of AI, and you can just say you built it all in a day or two instead of slacking off for months on your real work.

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

#190

Post by themafia »

tekno45 wrote: post #50
izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

Not very Billion Dollar Valuation of you.

Yes, but, I sleep very soundly at night.
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