Discussion

• @turnernovak Turner Novak on x

  Uber employees using $100k of Claude tokens to respond to an email [video]

• @karankendre Karan on x

  CEO waking up to a $500M Claude API bill [video]

• @wowbaggert @wowbaggert on bluesky

  Who could have guessed that incentivizing “token usage” instead of “engineering outcomes” would be bad and stupid? [embedded post]

• @stevenjcbuckley Dr. Steven Buckley on bluesky

  The industry was subsidised for a long time and now companies are now starting to realise that the very little gains that AI brings are not worth the actual cost of using them.  [embedded post]

• @carlquintanilla Carl Quintanilla on bluesky

  “.. pumping the brakes in a way that could complicate AI's triumphal march across the economy.”  —  @wsj.com  —  www.wsj.com/tech/ai/corp...  [image]

• @altryne Alex Volkov on x

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

• @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]

• @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.

• @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

• @quinnypig Corey Quinn on x

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

• @pivovarit Grzegorz Piwowarek on x

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

• @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…

• @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?

• @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]

• @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

• @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]

• @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

• @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]

• 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

• r/BetterOffline r on reddit

  Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets

• 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

• r/business r on reddit

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

• @ddemaree David Demaree on x

  Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

• @magnushambleton Magnus on x

  Show them the incentives and Amazon will show you the consequences

• @coreyward Corey Ward on x

  Seems like everybody has forgotten about Goodhart's Law: once a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric.

• @madisonmills22 Madison Mills on x

  Multiple executives tell me they're looking to decrease their AI expenses just as three major AI IPOs are on the horizon. My latest:

• @zackkanter Zack Kanter on x

  lol. the Anthropic CFO was on @InvestLikeBest two weeks ago and said they have an internal leaderboard. [image]

• @melodyskim Melody Kim on x

  this always seemed dumb to me. if we were seeing models gaming the system to pass evals, what makes us think humans would not be doing this? the real “eval” here is highest output to lowest token usage. if teams are using this to increase AI adoption, might i recommend

• @edzitron.com Ed Zitron on bluesky

  Wall Street Journal article today out about companies cutting AI costs and guess what WE'RE IN THE EARLY INNINGS  —  wsj.com/tech/ai/corp...  [embedded post]

• @chardr Charles R on bluesky

  Company's will realize pretty quickly that when they have to pay full price the tech isn't worth the cost.  [embedded post]

• @daniloc.xyz @daniloc.xyz on bluesky

  it's a bit like rewarding people for “most lines of code produced.”  Gates famously compared this to “making the heaviest airplane.” the real game is efficiency: making the most impact of the fewest tokens [embedded post]

• Sarah Hoffman Sarah Hoffman on linkedin

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

• @jessefelder.com Jesse Felder on bluesky

  ‘Corporate leaders are scrambling to bring down expenses by finding ways to ration AI use in their organizations, steer workers toward cheaper, homegrown tools and help them hone their skills to improve returns.’ www.wsj.com/tech/ai/corp...

• @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.

• @cszhu Christina on x

  tokenmaxxing is out, now tokenminning is in