5 ms·
Meta caps internal AI token spending
- conartist6 3mo agoI don't understand though. How will all the AI users replace all the non-AI users if they can't spend money that isn't theirs to win by default?
- downrightmike 3mo agoHow soon until this becomes part of the "no one wants to work anymore" argument
- _heimdall 3mo agoDon't worry, once we achieve post-scarcity they will have more tokens than they could ever dream for spending.
- simonw 3mo ago"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?
- qwertytyyuu 3mo agoI know right? What did the leadership think would happen when they give some of the worlds greatest software engineers (supportably), a easily quantifiable metric to target?
- VygmraMGVl 3mo agoThe leaderboard wasn't leadership generated, it was engineer generated from internally available data. The leadership target is "impact" from ai tools.
- Avicebron 3mo agoBudget impact is technically impact.
- gtowey 3mo agoWhat a wonderful scapegoat! Technically it's all "engineer created" because the managers generally don't do technical work. I bet many managers pushed their reports to increase their usage during their 1:1 meetings based on data from the leaderboard. If management had any sense that it was a bad metric, they had ample time to get ahead of it and take it down and provide appropriate guidance. Instead, predictably, they waited until it was a full on disaster and a crisis before acting.
- VygmraMGVl 3mo agoAt one point there were over 70 different token maxing dashboards as the management had a game of whack a mole trying to remove them. There definitely was encouragement from management about a year ago to increase ai usage, but once Claude code was allowed, they didn't really need to encourage anyone any more.
- jghn 3mo ago> Who could possibly have predicted that happening? Charles Goodhart :-)
- goldenarm 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- sharts 3mo agoHow dare you question the most effective allocators of capital.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3mo agoNow come on, there was a recent post where the author argued that infallible management knew this would happen, but was part of the double-secret-probation strategy to get the cogs to finally start using AI.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoI still think this is true and it’s not obvious to me from the source article that Meta believes otherwise. I couldn’t find the full memo, do they claim the leaderboard or “tokenmaxxing” era was a mistake?
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoWould they admit it if it was? Or would they try to find a plausible rationalisation for wasting billions without any return?
- Aurornis 3mo agoA past employer thought it was a good idea to put up a leaderboard of who sent the most Slack messages. They celebrated the people at the top for being so active. Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line. The Slack leaderboard was never shown again. Unfortunately the habit remained because people were afraid they were going to be secretly judged by how much Slack activity they generated. I expect the same thing is going to happen at companies who had token leaderboards. Once you've instilled that fear in people, they internalize the expectation.
- Loughla 3mo agoYou have to realize that if you set a measure, you're actually setting a goal for your employees. There is no such thing as a meaningless metric; why else would you measure it? No amount of "this isn't used for anything" will change that. It's inherent in human nature in the 21st century to believe any and all metrics will be used against them, and therefore must be gamed. It's why you also have to set UNBELIEVABLY clear goals and have incentives tied to those goals. Incentives meaning money. If you want to measure things, measure them. But have clear, consistent, and meaningful goals tied to bonuses or something if you want a thing done correctly.
- 4yfr 3mo agoKinda. The answer is simpler on the surface: focus. Generally the problem is the larger the firm’s operations, the harder it is to focus. Apple is the only firm that has done well on this consistently and doesn’t have a huge grave yard of failures to show for it.
- estearum 3mo agoAre you saying what people are hoping to achieve with stupid goals? Because yeah, obviously. But the point is that they're stupid, so they don't achieve that, and that failure is 100% knowable in most scenarios.
- dzonga 3mo agounfortunately at big tech, this shit will keep happening. people who make it to managers tend to have bozo tendencies & are yes men. before it was lines of code, Jira tickets closed. Now it's tokens spent.
- darth_avocado 3mo ago> Who could possibly have predicted that happening? Everyone except the executives who get paid millions to predict exactly that.
- Avicebron 3mo agoNot a problem. There are thousands of employees standing by, willing to sacrifice their jobs for their vision. It's a hard job, someone has to not pay consequences for bad decisions.
- red-iron-pine 3mo agopresumably they covered this in the boilerplate MBA courses they took, non?
- zulux 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoIt’s funny how many times the same thing happens at each large company. I think people’s thought process is this: > Oh wow! If I paid for this myself I would have spent a lot of money! Are other people spending as much as me? I’m going to create a leaderboard! > Oh no, my misinformed manager is using the leaderboard as a slight of hand for work. I need to game this now. Then the leaderboard is banned… I can’t see how this ever really goes up the chain beyond director.
- what 3mo agoThere is zero chance that this is how the leaderboards came to be.
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoWhat makes you assert that?
- skizm 3mo agoIt wasn't leadership doing this though. Any meta IC can generate internal apps and dashboards. This was unofficial and unsupported. Some random IC just made it for fun. Management is usually pretty lax with stuff like this (plenty of games and joke internal apps) so they left it up until it became a problem.
- John23832 3mo agoGiven that Meta has run 5ish layoffs at this point, and everyone is in survival mode, what did they expect? Everyone wants to juice whatever numbers possible to keep their jobs.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoI still don't understand how Mark Zuckerberg has any serious investors, he went on this AI tangent and has absolutely nothing to show for it, despite FB / Meta having built some key tech in the space. He needs to stop trying to do something "different" and literally try and build a serious coding agent he can sell, he could have probably had something worthwhile in that space by now. He started being drastically more serious into AI in 2022, and 2023 and he has nothing to show for it. Heck, he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point and either mended the bleeding or stopped it, not sure how many he has, but it beats losing this badly. If he doesn't wake up and learn how to business, I suspect he will lose his empire he's built up for himself.
- MangoCoffee 3mo ago>he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point "Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports" https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computing-capacity-via-cloud-business-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-07-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computi...
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoThat's fair, I guess still having that sort of leaderboard is a foolish way to burn a billion dollars.
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoHaven’t got numbers so I might be wrong, but I suspect it is dwarfed by the present size and future potential of Meta’s ads business.
- thewhitetulip 3mo agoEven in firms that don't hold this board, giving unlimited AI to people means those who don't bother to learn technology can now deliver 100x their capacity, in very poor quality code
- nsonha 3mo agoMy company has an AI leaderboard and ONE ranking to be this, AND OTHER rankings like efficiency (loc merged per token). No one is so stupid that they think any single one of this is to be optimized (gamed) for. Tech journalists have low opinion of people with actual skills who actually contribute to society, and when their opinions get posted here, it's often selectively echoed by people looking for a reason to feel smarter than the industry.
- judahmeek 3mo agoLoc merged per token seems like an even worse metric because it punishes tokens used for refactoring, brainstorming, & code review
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- smrtinsert 3mo agoThat is insane. I'm sure companies will learn the absolute wrong lesson from this, and attempt to centralize and kneecap token usage.
- downrightmike 3mo agoTokens are less valuable than the eyeball metric of the Dotcom era. At least the eyeballs were real then. I'd argue most of the AI value is related to how 'Dead' the internet is.
- 4yfr 3mo agoThis talk of tokens is wasteful. Ultimately the spend on tokens has to benefit the firm financially or it won’t continue spending on it.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo agoAs many companies do with all their budgets, down to the trivial and clearly positive EV cost of free coffee. So it goes, cost controls are hard and necessarily imprecise.
- dwoosley 3mo agoI’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.
- adam_arthur 3mo agoI'd guess through LLM embedded PoC projects. You can rack up token consumption extremely quickly when you embed LLMs into automated processes or products. I'd be very surprised if these numbers are just typical coding usage with no scripting/pipeline/automation stuff
- wpasc 3mo agoOne thing I find fascinating as a software engineer who talks to non software engineers who use AI tools is how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem. What I mean is that uploading a PDF into a chatbot tool seems to be an extraordinarily obvious use case that non technical (and technical) users would want to do. IMO claude, chatgpt/codex, etc should be able to optimize the PDF use case to be extremely token efficient as it's a very obvious use case. But when I start to explain to my wife/friends why it burns through so much quota, I find myself thinking "why should they have to understand this aspect of it". to me, that the details of PDF parsing and extracting are relevant to users (instead of solved such that you don't have to pay attention to it) shows how these tools are not nearly as "ready" as they are made out to be. I may be preaching to the choir on this one, but just my 2c
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3mo agoI hope someday we can get out of this local maxima of PDF documents. The format is terrible, but was right place, right time and might be impossible to dislodge.
- Loughla 3mo agoThe problem is that for 99% of people in 99% of cases they work fine. It's hard for people to understand that they're trash. Source; my last job working with accessibility and that nightmare.
- andsoitis 3mo agomeasure outcomes (impact), not effort (token usage, lines of code, code coverage, hours worked, etc.)
- 4yfr 3mo agoWhat outcomes though? The ones I’ve seen posted are still nonsensical metrics that a publicly traded firm absolutely doesn’t care about. It wants to see faster R&D, higher revenues from existing assets, greater operating margins, higher sales to invested capital ratio and so on… The best way to measure that for a software firm is up-time of services, usage and project completion duration
- wpasc 3mo agomeasuring uptime? I've seen Anthropic's status page, and they are a >$1 Trillion dollar company who "largely solved" coding. so clearly you aren't correct. /s
- 4yfr 3mo ago[flagged]
- wpasc 3mo agomy friend, I was being sarcastic before, and I am agreeing with you. LoC, token spend, etc as metrics are horrible measures. Software uptime is a great metric. I'm merely lamenting that in the age we're in, uptimes are getting worse and worse
- janalsncm 3mo agoOk, uptime. How do you measure an individual’s contribution to uptime? If Claude goes down does everyone take a hit? If Claude stays up everyone gets rewarded? If so, your metric cannot distinguish between a bad engineer and a good one. If not, you have the same problem you started with: measuring contributions to “uptime”.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nsagent 3mo agoNot surprising. It seems that the comment section of every coding agent thread has at least one person mentioning they use "tokenmaxxing" to increase their token usage because it was brought up during their quarterly review, at a standup, or some other communique from on high. Just wonder what happens when more and more companies introduce similar restrictions. Will that lead to devaluations of the LLM companies?
- whalesalad 3mo agoClearly no one is using Meta’s customer facing AI products. Why aren’t they using their own gpu/compute for development?
- wmf 3mo agoBecause Muse isn't good enough and why use Muse if they'll let you use Opus for free?
- gordon_freeman 3mo agothat is a fair point. The contrast between Meta and Apple could not be bigger here. Apple has billions of devices and yet they decided to use 3rd party models from OpenAI and later Google to build their AI features rather than building foundational models in house. Yet Meta did opposite: they built models (spending billions of $$$ and firing 10% of the company) for billions of users who rather would not use Meta AI features.
- eska 3mo ago[flagged]
- Trasmatta 3mo agoAll those billions spent on tokens by Meta, and not a single iota of value generated by any of it
- steve-atx-7600 3mo agoI guess maybe they can crank out more ads in their dystopian ad space of a social network site.
- tyre 3mo agoI love how confidently you say this, with no evidence provided (and I doubt you have any.) Just a pristine comment section yap.
- jazzyjackson 3mo agoIf there was a positive return on token spend they wouldn’t be capping it now would they?
- janalsncm 3mo agoIt’s possible for something to have diminishing returns. Having a speed limit does not imply the utility of driving is zero.
- stinkbeetle 3mo agoThat does not follow. Many things have diminishing returns curves.
- butlike 3mo agoYes, but a curve trends to zero. A cap is a step function to zero. I think they're saying there's no point in removing those diminishing return gains if there's still positive value to be had.
- stinkbeetle 3mo ago
- felix-the-cat 3mo agoWithin a few weeks of telling people at our company that if they don’t use AI they will be replaced by someone who does, they just announced that their allocation with ChatGPT has reset and are now panicking as they blew through their million token allocation for this month in under six hours - you can’t make this shit up.
- Atotalnoob 3mo agoA million tokens is like $15 with SOTA models… that’s their allocation?
- felix-the-cat 3mo agoIt was more like some kind of credit thing, not tokens.
- root_axis 3mo agoNot sure if I missed it but I couldn't find any information in the article to explain where the "approaching billions" estimate is coming from. I could believe it, but I'd want to see something a little more concrete.
- bdcravens 3mo agoAnd I still can't exhaust the limits on my Claude Max subscription, despite being more productive than I've ever been in terms of real work (ie, things that actually make money)
- jm4 3mo agoFor real. I've used 8B tokens in the past month and haven't hit my limits even once. In fact, I can't even get close except for the day I used Fable. I've barely stopped. Claude keeps reminding me to sleep.
- ifwinterco 3mo agoBecause that’s heavily subsidised, whereas companies have to pay something closer to the actual price. Enjoy it while you can, because it won’t last forever. Per-token billing is quite eye opening in terms of how much it can cost
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoWasn’t this already reported on? FWIW this article links to primary sources from early last month https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta-moves-curb-employee-ai-usage-ai-costs-reach-billions https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta...
- acka 3mo agoFact is that I can actually read TFA, while your link is paywalled.
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoI mean… should you be able to? It looks like this is just an AI summarizing a bunch of other paywalled sources. It’s “by MLQ Agent”
- d4rkp4ttern 3mo agoOk I’ll ask since nobody else has — are they not giving their devs a Claude code max or Codex Pro subscription? If so, why is token cost approaching billions? And if not, why not?
- 542458 3mo agoEnterprise customers don’t get those plans, at the enterprise level you have to pay by the API rate… so people don’t have limited use, but you’re also not getting the heavily discounted rate the “normal” plans are at.
- fuzzfactor 3mo ago>Meta plans to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure through 2026 and commits $600 billion to data center buildouts through 2028 And they can't afford a few extra billion that their engineers can utilize right now? Looks like AI as it develops is intended to be too expensive for regular people in the long run, but if Meta can't even afford it at that rate, who can?
- lesuorac 3mo agoThey can't. The subscriptions are for personal use not enterprise. i.e. [1] "This article is about paid Max plans for individual consumers. If you're part of an organization looking to use Claude with your team, refer to Team and Enterprise Plans." [1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-max-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-...
- TimByte 3mo ago[dead]
- grim_io 3mo agoBig enterprises don't get to have those subscriptions. OpenAI or Anthropic simply won't sell them to you if you need a couple thousand of those.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- wonderwonder 3mo agoI have never worked there and I am likely very unqualified to ever work there and Zuck has more money than I could dream of so take my comment with that in mind. Meta sounds like a cluster-F of a place to work. Massive reorgs around wild ideas like the metaverse and everything Ai all the time. Employees terrified of being fired. Incentivizing token spending and then cutting it off. While the overall company may be fine, the dev department sounds rudderless and absolutely miserable.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoThis is what you get when token consumption becomes a KPI...
- xnx 3mo agoIt's stories like this that really dispell the genius/merit theory of successful business. The best you can say about Zuck is he didn't prevent Facebook from becoming huge.
- fuzzfactor 3mo agoThis is the real point. If an average person had access to the same amount of capital and ended up with the same ownership terms, there would have been a more sensible outcome for everyone affected.
- butlike 3mo ago> The best you can say about Zuck is he didn't prevent Facebook from becoming huge. Doesn't the legend go Zuck didn't even see the big picture until Sean Parker spelled it out for him?
- hodgehog11 3mo agoJudging from the decisions and outputs of the last decade or so, the leadership at Meta, including Mark Zuckerberg, have got to be among the most incompetent I have ever seen. They go all in on the worst decisions; not just the worst in hindsight, but also the worst at the time. The only thing keeping them afloat is their monopoly from past purchases. They are a posterchild for why the US is no longer a properly capitalist nation.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago2 week old news OP; Various discussions: Meta’s chaotic AI strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602571 Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461 Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708795
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoHad a similar comment but what’s even weirder and I seemed to have missed entirely at first glance is that this is an AI news aggregator agent? The article is “by MLQ Agent.”
- peter_d_sherman 3mo ago>"The internal memo disclosed that Meta employees consumed 73.7 trillion tokens in roughly 30 days , a figure tracked on an internal leaderboard called "Claudeonomics" — a reference to Anthropic's Claude, one of the third-party AI tools widely used inside the company [2]. The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output. Meta plans to dismantle the leaderboard and replace it with a centralized monitoring platform called "AI Gateway," which will track usage and spending across teams in real time [2]." This seems to be an interesting upcoming business, that is: Helping companies centralize and track their AI usage by employee. Anyway, great article!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- noashavit 3mo agoUber, Microsoft and now Meta. All tokenmaxing to the max on Claude
- jaredcwhite 3mo agoin an old-timey cartoon voice "Now he tells me!" bonk
- TimByte 3mo agoThe most interesting number is missing here, and that is the token distribution by use case. If 60-70% was eaten up by PDFs, agents and automation instead of people actually sitting in Claude Code, then it is a completely different story
- investmuse 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]