I’m genuinely curious why they don’t cap at $100/month Claude Max per employee. That would be sufficient for 80% of them.
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
#292I find it shocking that anyone ever thought tokenmaxxing was a good idea. AI maximalists like to compare the technology to electricity. Imagine if in the early days of electrification, a CEO had rewarded staff for increasing the amount of electricity they consumed rather than finding ways to use it for business impact. Institutionalizing people who showed signs of mental illness was popular in those days, and I suspe…
The problem is that it is a good idea at the individual level. Poor management reads it as a signal of productivity.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#293tokenmaxxing is becoming harder to justify could be a change in the labor market => when capital was free the companies optimized aggressively around retention and internal status spending but high rates + slow growth oblige firms to back toward productivity and operating leverage.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised, I know a few devs in very big tech companies, not faang but you definitely know them, and they all have some kind of token leaderboards, a few told their dev "we don't want you to write a single line of code manually anymore", etc. I assume the execs perspective is something like: if the top 20% of worker produce 80% of the code with LLMs and the company still works then we can get rid of the bott…
But even if the end goal was to lay off 80% of programmers, shouldn't the 20% to keep be the developers delivering the 80% of the code, regardless of whether they spent the most to do it? Like what if the 20% of workers spending the most tokens were actually the bottom 20% in terms of delivery because they were using the worst prompts and having AI constantly implement 5 different versions of everything, then throwin…
Ah, but "who uses the most tokens" is a number, a number generated by a computer no less. Questions like who delivers lots of high quality work require you to do research and make judgements, which is work.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, I guess possibly they figured out that humans using their own vehicles turn out to be cheaper than contracting or owning self-driving vehicles.
Uber is regularly offering 50¢/mile trips now (which they charge significantly more than that to the rider for). There's no way an autonomous vehicle is going to get operating costs that low anytime soon.
Considering the IRS mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile, sounds like there's no way any kind of vehicle is going to get operating costs that low!
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#296I find it shocking that anyone ever thought tokenmaxxing was a good idea. AI maximalists like to compare the technology to electricity. Imagine if in the early days of electrification, a CEO had rewarded staff for increasing the amount of electricity they consumed rather than finding ways to use it for business impact. Institutionalizing people who showed signs of mental illness was popular in those days, and I suspe…
The problem is that it is a good idea at the individual level. Poor management reads it as a signal of productivity.
Regularly experimenting with AI tools as they improve and relying on them where they provide an advantage is a good idea at both individual and institutional levels. Maximizing usage for its own sake is not.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#297Earlier 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.
> Employees are hesitant to learn new tools that are very different from what they are used to...
That simply isn't true for technical employees (like software devs). They are so hungry to get stuff done that you have to hold them back from adopting new tools which they think can make them work more effectively. Tech guys will set up entire shadow IT departments just to get around corporate restrictions that are limiting their productivity.
No, if software devs are not using LLMs for programming, that is proof that the tool isn't actually useful for them. It doesn't mean "they need to be forced to use it", because they didn't need to be forced to use any of the tools which came before it.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#298I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource. I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight. For a wh…
Most AI front ends seem to be designed for interactive jobs, so they make it hard to define a job that should be done eventually with zero priority. It makes much more sense to do that with spec-driven development (have work done with the human on the loop rather in the loop), but as far as I know that just isn’t well supported by any front end yet (would be happy to be proven wrong, my experience is with Google front ends).
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#299I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource. I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight. For a wh…
You’re right of course, but wouldn’t it be more likely that everyone will embrace 10x cheaper Chinese models?
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#300"He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features." He's saying that like it's some grand epiphany and not the most self-evident, obvious thing I've heard this month. Some of the literal dumbest people on earth are in charge of these major companies.
This is also Uber we’re talking about. The company that famously developed a massively engineered ledger to track every event across the entire company, globally consistently, forever, in a single database. This definitely adds enormous value to the bottom line!
The fact that a company with such a ledger has trouble advocating for AI-maxxxing will make watching the "ur holding ur AI wrong bro"-reactions all the more hilarious.