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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone actually at a company that is purposely trying to use a ton of tokens? It gets expensive really fast.

For about 2 months, then I assume our fearless leaders saw the bill and wet themselves. Since then, Opus is off limits lol.

I've personally had people talk about token leaderboards at their work. Amazon and Meta did have ones, but I'd take with a decent grain of salt.

We all know it's such an insanely gameable metric you'd be insane to actually use it...

I came across a comedy clip where the employees are fighting over how many billion tokens they were using and assumed it was a joke.

It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages the most prolific users to find creative ways to squander more to stay the “winner”. Management is slightly disappointed by the waste but also happy that staff are engaging with their future replacements.

many of these leaderboards were built internally by curious ICs and taken down by leadership (for obvious reasons).

Yes, but also this particular company has the means to justify the expense. I think there's enough opportunity at scale in the industry to really change the business landscape.

Aside from that (and assuming a large enough sample size) I think it's a safe experiment to at least bet on finding profitable use cases. In 1-2 years, after this experiment runs its course, not everyone will have "unlimited" usage.

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