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

businessinsider.com

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

#21

Post by mattlondon »

gigatexal wrote: post #2

I find it useful that if they cut the use altogether I will pay for it out of pocket.

Probably long term each dev gets their own GPU and runs a model locally I expect. Seems like a more sustainable approach, even if a local model is not absolute SOTA.

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

#23

Post by nekzn »

internet2000 wrote: post #22
nekzn wrote: post #8

It’s funny that “maxxing” entered the common vocabulary.

A good 80% by volume of the modern vernacular is 4chan language that got sanded down.

Sanding down is how we got goyslop turned into slop.

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

#24

Post by cwillu »

epolanski wrote: post #15
egypturnash wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Slightly ot, but I really dislike this reddit WSBization of HN. Adds nothing insightful to these discussions.

“Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.” --hn guidelines (there are links to examples in the original)

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

#25

Post by solenoid0937 »

chihuahua wrote: post #12

It's amazing that it took months to figure this out. "Well we thought that if engineers are told to maximize costs through AI use, to consume as much as possible of a resource that costs us money, then obviously good things will happen. Imagine my surprise when it didn't turn out that way." Imagine if engineers were ranked based on their AWS spend. People allocate VMs and fill databases with terabytes of random bits,…

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.

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

#28

Post by Wowfunhappy »

7777777phil wrote: post #9

As soon as tokens stop stop being subsidized, heavy agentic use will become as least as expensive than paying an (entry level) employee. When this happens many companies will trade off havy tolen usage for (maybe a bit slower, bit less accurate) employees again.

DeepSeek is an open weights model. It's possible the hosted versions are subsidized, but we know what it costs to run locally. And it's expensive, but it's also pretty clearly cheaper than an employee.

Of course, the latest DeepSeek models are not as good as Claude, but they're not super far off either.

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

#30

Post by roxolotl »

chihuahua wrote: post #12

It's amazing that it took months to figure this out. "Well we thought that if engineers are told to maximize costs through AI use, to consume as much as possible of a resource that costs us money, then obviously good things will happen. Imagine my surprise when it didn't turn out that way." Imagine if engineers were ranked based on their AWS spend. People allocate VMs and fill databases with terabytes of random bits,…

The inability of leaders to understand Goodhart’s Law is always a sight to behold. They see a number go up and pat themselves on the back for how well their employees are making it go up without ever wondering if the thing they care about is happening.
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