Discussion

• @garymarcus @garymarcus on x

  tokenmaxxing is officially over

• @gergelyorosz Gergely Orosz on x

  A month and a half ago I shared how tokenmaxxing is spreading as a weird, new trend, and all it does is generate a massive company bill. Amazon learning what was obvious even back then. Encouraging tokenmaxxing is very expensive and honestly pretty stupid [image]

• @packym Packy McCormick on x

  I can't believe they're shutting off the tokenmaxxing leaderboards the exact same day that Anthropic announces its $65 billion round. [image]

• @quinnypig Corey Quinn on x

  Local company discovers “Frugality” leadership principle incompatible with asking employees to compete at incinerating money.

• @drewpusateri @drewpusateri on x

  just throwing it out there, but maybe both the tokenmaxing is the new religion *and* the tokenmaxing is dead discourse are overblown and the truth is about optimizing usage the same way you would virtually all other things?

• @neillewisjr Neil Lewis, Jr on bluesky

  Goodhart's Law strikes again:  —  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.  [embedded post]

• @harrymccracken.com Harry McCracken on bluesky

  Eventually, the world will figure out that AI use should be all about quality, not quantity.  I'm surprised it's not obvious to everyone already. https://www.ft.com/content/b1a62a7f- 6df5-4c90-94ce-64ce9c9961b6

• r/business r on reddit

  Exclusive: Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores

• r/BetterOffline r on reddit

  Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores

• @gergelyorosz Gergely Orosz on x

  I can now probably say this: Two months ago, inside Anthropic someone suggested building a token leaderboard. A heated internal debate followed and the decision was made to *never* ever do it... because several people inside Anthropic simply thought ahead of the consequences

• @irishoutsider @irishoutsider on bluesky

  Once again reminded of the time the Groupon sales floor figured out how to smash their talk time targets by calling the toll free Hall and Oates hotline at lunchtime.  [embedded post]

• r/technology r on reddit

  Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers boosting usage scores — Senior executive tells staff 'don't use AI just for the sake of using AI' as computing costs rise

• r/theprimeagen r on reddit

  Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores

• @timduy Tim Duy on x

  I just can't see how firms decided to reward employees for maximizing use of inputs rather than maximizing output.

• @appyg99 Apoorva Govind on x

  Who could have predicted that! It was impossible to think people would game the system. Goodhart's law is for chumps.

• @pivovarit Grzegorz Piwowarek on x

  “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” Goodhart's law

• @olearycrew Brendan O'Leary on x

  Tokenmaxxing Gone but not forgotten. 🪦 [image]

• @chrismunns Chris Munns on x

  Amzn employees gamifying metrics?? Isn't there a PTA for that? [image]

• @austen Austen Allred on x

  Im calling BS on this story. 1. That would be 100,000 employees spending $5k/mo each or 10,000 employees averaging $50k/mo each. No way. 2. Anthropic isn't going to float that much on an invoice without checking in 3. The source being a consultant talking about a client = lie [im…

• @mardehaym Mark Ajzenstadt on x

  None of this is satire. → A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits → Uber ran leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used, not what they shipped → Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can't

• @altryne Alex Volkov on x

  This is how you “lose” 500M on Claude Inference

• r/BetterOffline r on reddit

  Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets

• r/singularity r on reddit

  Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores |  Senior executive Dave Treadwell tells staff 'don't use AI just for the sake of using AI' as costs rise

• Sarah Hoffman Sarah Hoffman on linkedin

  Amazon just shut down an internal leaderboard that scored developers on their AI activity.  Employees, unsurprisingly …

• @augustiner_h Augusto on x

  every cycle we go through the same learnings dont we

• @bendee983 Ben Dickson on x

  That was a really expensive way to learn tokenmaxxing is dumb. Maximizing LLM usage just for the sake of flexing your use of AI is a recipe for disaster.

• @thejasonchan Jason Chan on x

  Classic “show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome” When mgmt made this decision they should have just taken it one step further and thought: 1. what would I do if I had this rule imposed upon me 2. what would a smart person who is trying to take advantage of this

• @nbgreene14 @nbgreene14 on x

  This is exactly why “AI usage” is a terrible KPI. The incentive shouldn't be how many prompts an employee runs. It should be whether the AI-powered workflow they create gets adopted by others and actually saves time, increases output, or improves quality. Otherwise you just get

• Sophie Hurcombe Sophie Hurcombe on linkedin

  Tokenmaxxing failed because it was just performance management with a worse metric.  —  Replace “tokens used” with “hours worked” or …

• Peter Merholz Peter Merholz on linkedin

  What the heck has happened to Amazon?  For all their faults, they were a standard-bearer of a responsibility culture. …

• @marygillis Mary Gillis on bluesky

  Who would've thought encouraging employees to use an expensive product as much as possible with no oversight over than measuring how much they're using it could possibly backfire?

• @dgschell @dgschell on bluesky

  Every day it seems we're getting articles about the real costs of AI.  If AI is to be reined in, it won't be because of the job insecurity its causing or environmental harm, but because it's proving too costly compared to human labor.