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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 pro

• tekno45 4mo ago
  Not very Billion Dollar Valuation of you.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • themafia 4mo ago
    Yes, but, I sleep very soundly at night.
• devin 4mo ago
  The people who have ascended to leadership positions are deeply divorced from reality. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
  • lorecore 4mo ago
    The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).
    • repeekad 4mo ago
      Every c suite in the country is panicking about being left behind, from their perspective it’s either token max or fade into obscurity, or at least that’s what they were sold
      • lorecore 4mo ago
        I don't think that's accurate. I think every C suite in the country is looking to do away with labor's leverage as much as possible. I think this is a cultural thing more than anything else, C suite + investors looking to get rid of those pesky humans required to prop up their lifestyles. AI is the most credible path toward that. Short, medium or long term returns be damned, this is a reconfiguration of society and they want to shed what they consider to be baggage.
        • devin 4mo ago
          Like anything it's a mixed bag. I am certainly working with people who I think truly believe the "max out on AI usage or become irrelevant" line. There are people who will privately let you know they're just working with the current meta the best way they can, but others who are drunk on kool aid. Trying to operate as a rational, thinking person in a lot of environments right now feels impossible. Rational thought is being treated like AI skepticism.
      • treis 4mo ago
        Please. These are the same people that force their employees to use Microsoft teams because slack is $5 an employee a month. They're not going to sit idly by while employees burn thousands a month in tokens.
        • devin 4mo ago
          It depends on which people you're referring to. The allocation toward AI budget has been so massive that I think a lot of businesses are way behind on trying to assess value for dollar for the AI-related crud they're shelling out for.
          • treis 4mo ago
            Everyone is feeling it out but the vast majority of spend has been subscription based. Some outliers may have used a massive amount of tokens but companies didn't pay for that. That VC funded gravy train is likely coming to an end. But fortunately there are also reasonably efficient models now so that the tokenmaxxers can still make the (much cheaper) tokens go brrrr.
    • transitorykris 4mo ago
      I deeply believe this but have no strong evidence. Revenue has always been a cure all remedy. This will keep model providers alive along with the very wide range of companies that are experiencing growth with them (from chips to backhoes), for a time anyway. If/when that house of cards starts going in the other direction there’s going to be widespread pain. By analogy the nonsense of the dotcoms and that crash had a very direct impact on their suppliers (e.g. telecoms). My only advice is to let the Microsoft’s and Meta’s do the tokenmaxxing, and don’t get suckered into the idea you (startup, individual, etc) should be playing that game.
  • pera 4mo ago
    They get paid for saying whatever VCs want to hear and now that thing is "we have now become an AI-native company". The thing I'm still trying to understand is who is scamming whom
    • nradov 4mo ago
      Uber is publicly traded. They're not beholden to VCs any more.
      • pera 4mo ago
        I don't believe the comments I replied to were specific to Uber.
• zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
  Come on, don’t be crazy
• Lalabadie 4mo ago
  You're now in the last frame of the comic, getting thrown out the window.
  • swed420 4mo ago
    Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.
    • nradov 4mo ago
      What would such an economic system look like?
      • ian_j_butler 4mo ago
        This is actually pretty well-understood if people wanted to do it.. contrary to popular belief it's more about responsible governance than economics and not really a pro/anti capitalism thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_principles_illustrated_by_long-enduring_CPR_(Common_Pool_Resource)_institutions%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...
    • robocat 4mo ago
      Go ahead and start from the small and grow it bigger: you could become a billionaire if you succeed.
      • chowells 4mo ago
        Hahahaha.... What if the goal of an economic system was to support everyone instead of maximizing the upside for winners? Perhaps that's the sort of change necessary for improvement. Perhaps having billionaires is the failure state.
        • robocat 4mo ago
          > goal of an economic system A goal fails - who sets a goal? The keyword is system. An economic system needs something like a Nash equilibrium where defectors are sufficiently discouraged (and cooperators are rewarded as you imply). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
• symfoniq 4mo ago
  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 everything—there isn’t room for original thinking. Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.
  • overfeed 4mo ago
    > Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same. If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.
  • AdrianB1 4mo ago
    Lacking not just courage, but also character. Wasting company money on buzzwords and dubious outcomes is lack of character.
  • justinparus 4mo ago
    Is keeping your company private the easiest way to get around this?
  • CharlieDigital 4mo ago
    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 ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves. So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources. Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.
• 99954bb63ccc 4mo ago
  I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is going to know what I do or don't know, but I'm just increasingly curious what I am not understanding about this type of thing. It seems so obvious, yet that makes me ever more suspect that I'm oversimplifying it, or just totally ignorant about the problem in general.
  • turzmo 4mo ago
    Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.
  • mike_hearn 4mo ago
    It's because the average organization has lots of people who don't care about their own productivity and won't adopt new tools or processes unless forced to. This is true of most new tech - lots of workers had to be forced into using computers - but AI also has some other bumps to cross like lots of people who tried early models and then wrote them off, not realizing how fast they'd improve. And most orgs have no infrastructure or processes for allocating individuals token budgets, and most employees have no experience of properly deploying budgets. Roll it all together and saying "just use it dammit" has some obvious advantages: 1. It's clear. 2. It's simple. 3. It eliminates all excuses employees might come up with for not using it. The people at the top of these companies aren't stupid. They might have miscalculated how many tokens people can actually use, but that's very hard to calculate because usage is opaque and tools/processes change on a nearly weekly basis. They will eventually build out processes, tools, social conventions and performance metrics that take into account efficiency of token usage. But this is hard! Most managers aren't really assessed on the precise productivity of their teams, for instance, because productivity is often poorly defined.
  • overfeed 4mo ago
    > what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting Game theory! The downside of being brave vastly outweighs the upside. For the C-suite, there is no cost to herdlike-behavior, regardless of the outcome. However, there is a very high personal downside to being a maverick, and your board later discovers you made the wrong choice against the grain. The upside of being maverick and right is very limited. Once a behavior has become mainstream, hopping on the bandwagon is no longer individually attributable to decision-makers, but is seen (and reported) as a macro-economic phenomenon: Nadella, Zuckerberg and Bezos didn't overhire - the American tech industry overhired.
• blitzar 4mo ago
  If there are any tech CEOs out there reading, I can offer my services. I will pointlessly burn unfathomable amounts of tokens, in parallel, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all for you. Think big big big numbers of tokens, you know whats cooler than a trillion tokens, a quadrillion tokens. Lets talk my bonus, I will open the bidding at $1 per token.
• stusmall 4mo ago
  That was a fun thought experiment while I waited for my ralph wiggum to finish running. Now thinking is over and back to the vibe
• Aurornis 4mo ago
  > 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 their companies will be doing the same thing. It’s getting so bad that the conversation is shifting to how to identify and coach the token-maxxers to stop wasting the team’s budget every week.
  • throwaw12 4mo ago
    > 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
    • Aurornis 4mo ago
      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.
  • skt5 4mo ago
    > I participate in some management-focused online communities. I know - slightly off topic - but would you be willing to share this list?
  • eudamoniac 4mo ago
    I can personally verify that Cisco does it and they're not exactly at the top of the food chain. It's probably more common than you think.
• icepush 4mo ago
  Sounds to me like you are advocating the decimation of the technology sector and a global recession that could last the better part of a decade, buddy!
• port11 4mo ago
  You mean… increasing AI budget has no direct relationship with productivity and therefore revenue? It’s not that simple? But… my TEDx talk and LinkedIn ramblings…
• sometimelurker 4mo ago
  > ... stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? and tokenmaxxing is even worse due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law because whatever you measure with tokens, once you start "tokenmaxxing" you have no measure to look at