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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

#221

Post by HDThoreaun »

KaiserPro wrote: post #195
CharlieDigital wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights" Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but a…

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."

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

#222

Post by 05 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #172
rr808 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol yeah I'm not a poet.

Just append a reactive metal. "Like water through sodium"

Or make water relativistic, xkcd What-If style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfbzrrcQZjs&t=155

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

#223

Post by lumost »

mejutoco wrote: post #185
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.

This will probably lead to some balancing act like ye olden days of big data etc. Companies want AI native engineers who will use AI to do their work, but don't want AI quality outputs and don't want to drop 200k per year per employee.

AI quality outputs are fine for backoffice work now, but they are awful to read and reason about. Hallucinated features are also difficult to work with.

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

#224

Post by dgellow »

arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #180
fsloth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Would love to know what things!

OP (solenoid0937) is an unfounded AI-hype peddler and an Anthropic shill (check their comment history), do not expect them to provide an actual example of their wild claims.

I checked their history and they seem alright ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#225

Post by discreteevent »

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 devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI

So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it.

It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.

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

#226

Post by Aurornis »

throwaw12 wrote: post #198
Aurornis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity I participate in some management-focused online communities. It’s crazy how many threads there are from frustrated managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance. I think a few dumb companies did this and then it spread across social media, triggering a mass panic from engineers afraid thei…

> managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance. Because it is going to happen. Do you think metrics are tracked for fun? Even if current leaders don't do it, next people might do it, how do you tell new leaders that we don't look at this metric? Metric exists to take action based on it

You missed the second half of my comment: There’s more to a metric than making one number go up. It’s becoming a real problem when people use 10X more tokens to get similar work done because they’re tokenmaxxing.

Nobody wants 90% of their token budget spend going to the 10% of people wasting them for number-go-up purposes.

Inefficient token use is going to become a metric.

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

#227

Post by archagon »

bilater wrote: post #83

The black bill that is coming that nobody is prepared for is that the value of a token varies greatly depending on the human. Companies will quickly find out its much better to give your top 10% engineers a lot more tokens and lay off your average engineers. The 10x engineer will become the 1000x engineer. Wrote about this and the impact of to jobs here: https://x.com/deepwhitman/status/2058324179506831372

Lol, no, no one’s becoming a 1000x engineer.

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

#228

Post by satvikpendem »

vasco wrote: post #202
CharlieDigital wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases A lot of monkeys will also eventually type up Shakespeare?

Indeed, but that's not a bad thing. If monkeys can produce the next Shakespeare, that will be wildly popular and profitable for the company that did it, justifying the initial waste, just as VC does with companies as a whole.

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

#229

Post by satvikpendem »

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.

Everyone says this but no one seems to have an answer as to what it'd be.

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

#230

Post by CharlieDigital »

discreteevent wrote: post #225
CharlieDigital wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it. It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.

    > What's the hurry?
There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.

There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.

Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.

I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.

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