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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

#31

Post by this_user »

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 point of this was always to explore what is possible with AI as quickly as possible. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of waste, but the 5-10% of employees who are truly thinking about it and discovering novel applications are what you are truly after. Because right now, you effectively have a giant, as of yet poorly explored space of potential uses.

Anyone who can find the actually valuable portions of the space early has a potentially huge competitive advantage. Even if the result of the experiment is the negative that AI is actually mostly not that useful, that is still extremely useful information in a time of great uncertainty regarding outcomes.

The bottom line is that this approach may be expensive, but if you have the money to burn, it's far from the worst strategy if you are trying to position yourself correctly for the future.

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

#32

Post by steveBK123 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #25
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.

> 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.

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

#34

Post by FartyMcFarter »

If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company.

No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.

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

#35

Post by morpheuskafka »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #25
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.

> But it's not. Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens

Giving someone unlimited access to a resources is not the same as directing or incentivizing them to use it for the sake of using it which is what the parent comment criticized.

As for the other FAANGs, Meta and Google have (not good but still) frontier models of their own, so they are very different from a company paying API costs per token.

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

#36

Post by LaurensBER »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #34

If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company. No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.

Tokens are the new "lines of code per engineer". Easy to graph, easy to "manage".

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

#37

Post by SecretDreams »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #25
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.

Show me some fang that have made nice outwards facing products through a fully embraced AI workflow?

AI is an accelerator that engineers should know and have access to, but it's not something that should have mandated usage and quotas around. It's also absolutely dangerous for young engineers and the like - it fundamentally denies you of the "learning" aspect. I'm now seeing in interviews young graduates being given AI tasks to complete and they come back with a correct solution and no concept of how it is working.

You learn and reinforce learning by DOING and reading in depth. High level summaries don't teach anything and are the kinds of things only VPs care about. So, unless the intention in the future is for everyone to be a VP using AI to do the work, we need some middle ground here and some real thought around implementation of these tools or there's going to be a generational canyon gap of knowledge between being able to "say" and being able to "do".

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

#39

Post by FartyMcFarter »

SecretDreams wrote: post #26
cryo32 wrote: post #16

Waiting for tokenedging next.

Is this when you type the prompt into the text window, but don't hit enter? Make the GPU see the message "x is typing"? Lol.

As long as there's an RPC connection established and a partially sent request, I think it would count.
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