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> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboard

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said. Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.

idle_zealot 5mo ago
> that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?
- strongpigeon 5mo ago
  Having worked in big tech, I can almost guarantee you you’re overthinking this.
strongpigeon 5mo ago
Not that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well. It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
  It gets worse, my corp is tech adjacent at best, so we get push to use AI, but also get heavily restricted tokens, ridiculous limits on internal tooling ( think context for one short prompt ) and expectation that now one should be able to create the $result fast anyway... Edit: and if you question that, you are a troublemaker to add to the list
zerreh50 5mo ago
It will get really funny when they start imposing an exact number of tokens as a quota, where too little means you are an outdated luddite and too much is inefficient and wastes money
- noisy_boy 5mo ago
  Keep squeezing that window everytime you need to fire some more people.
- bravetraveler 5mo ago
  I'm skipping the LLMs/extra steps and simply waiting for the PIP; $EMPLOYER can go ahead and say exactly how many pieces of flair, sorry, tokens they think I need to do my work. It's exactly 0 but I'd like to hear their joke. Not at Meta but see hints building towards similar madness. War Games, it is. How about chess instead? I'm not big on market manipulation.
sardukardboard 5mo ago
A funny Goodhart’s Law parallel showed up in during GPT-5.1 training, where the model was rewarded for using the web search tool, so it learned the behavior of superficially using web search to calculate “1 + 1” and not utilize the result. https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/ https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
logickkk1 5mo ago
[dead]
skybrian 5mo ago
This is a company incentive to increase expenses. Maybe not as bad as Dilbert's "I'm gonna myself a new minivan," but still.
superfrank 5mo ago
My company did something similar (dashboard to track tokens). It was made available to managers about two weeks before it was available to everyone, so I got to see all my reports' usage before they knew they were being tracked. The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it. On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools. I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.
- akomtu 5mo ago
  Those executives are simply implementing the directive to inject as much AI as possible into every gear of the economy. Their bonuses depend on this. The idea is that if the world economy becomes dependent on this AI monstrosity, we won't be able to get rid of it. It will be like a situation with a nasty parasite that does a lot of harm, but cannot be removed without the host dying.
  - ychnd 5mo ago
    That sounds just like Microsoft, Facebook or Oracle products (in some circles). What I'm trying to say it is classic strategy done many times before with various tools (and I hate the perpetrators every time).
sidewndr46 5mo ago
I'm reminded of the sales dashboard that tracked the number of calls each sales employee made. There was one employee in 1st place that I assume just always called the same customers multiple times. Her position was about 10x 2nd place. If someone gave me unfettered access to inference of modern LLMs, there would be no concept of measurement other than the total system wide capacity of whatever the company had available.

idle_zealot 5mo ago

> that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?

strongpigeon 5mo ago
Having worked in big tech, I can almost guarantee you you’re overthinking this.

strongpigeon 5mo ago

Not that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well. It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.

iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
It gets worse, my corp is tech adjacent at best, so we get push to use AI, but also get heavily restricted tokens, ridiculous limits on internal tooling ( think context for one short prompt ) and expectation that now one should be able to create the $result fast anyway... Edit: and if you question that, you are a troublemaker to add to the list

zerreh50 5mo ago

It will get really funny when they start imposing an exact number of tokens as a quota, where too little means you are an outdated luddite and too much is inefficient and wastes money

noisy_boy 5mo ago
Keep squeezing that window everytime you need to fire some more people.
bravetraveler 5mo ago
I'm skipping the LLMs/extra steps and simply waiting for the PIP; $EMPLOYER can go ahead and say exactly how many pieces of flair, sorry, tokens they think I need to do my work. It's exactly 0 but I'd like to hear their joke. Not at Meta but see hints building towards similar madness. War Games, it is. How about chess instead? I'm not big on market manipulation.

sardukardboard 5mo ago

A funny Goodhart’s Law parallel showed up in during GPT-5.1 training, where the model was rewarded for using the web search tool, so it learned the behavior of superficially using web search to calculate “1 + 1” and not utilize the result. https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/ https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/

logickkk1 5mo ago

[dead]

skybrian 5mo ago

This is a company incentive to increase expenses. Maybe not as bad as Dilbert's "I'm gonna myself a new minivan," but still.

superfrank 5mo ago

My company did something similar (dashboard to track tokens). It was made available to managers about two weeks before it was available to everyone, so I got to see all my reports' usage before they knew they were being tracked. The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it. On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools. I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.

akomtu 5mo ago
Those executives are simply implementing the directive to inject as much AI as possible into every gear of the economy. Their bonuses depend on this. The idea is that if the world economy becomes dependent on this AI monstrosity, we won't be able to get rid of it. It will be like a situation with a nasty parasite that does a lot of harm, but cannot be removed without the host dying.
- ychnd 5mo ago
  That sounds just like Microsoft, Facebook or Oracle products (in some circles). What I'm trying to say it is classic strategy done many times before with various tools (and I hate the perpetrators every time).

sidewndr46 5mo ago

I'm reminded of the sales dashboard that tracked the number of calls each sales employee made. There was one employee in 1st place that I assume just always called the same customers multiple times. Her position was about 10x 2nd place. If someone gave me unfettered access to inference of modern LLMs, there would be no concept of measurement other than the total system wide capacity of whatever the company had available.