Also ironically, a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI rollouts by burning tokens on stupid shit. It seems to be working.
Also ironically, a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI rollouts by burning tokens on stupid shit. It seems to be working.
They couldn't see that coming, but for sure they can predict how the future will be when it's time to sell their "visions" of the world.
Meanwhile, sheep's are going to believe and max their token usage with their own wallet. "You are so be left behind if you're not".
It's a mass psychosis. The only winners here are the hardware manufacturers, like nvidia for instance.
It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
It's not baffling. They are a caste, wholly insulated from the consequences of their own actions.
Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
After ejecting anyone who spoke out or were even publicly hesistant against the hard swerve into "just do maximal amounts of AI stuff above all else", they're now surprised to find that everyone that remains is dutifully excited about the emperor's new clothes, and yet he remains mysteriously exposed to the breeze.
Sometimes literally.
(Meaning that it's not just business school indoctrination, but a dynamic they've been raised to expect and uphold. Fixing it isn't simply about convincing them of the folly of their approach, because you're attacking their personal sense of self in doing so. Which, I'm to understand, is a no-no, professionally.)
Is it not wild that in the Freedom Loving West, we all spend the vast majority of our time as adults living inside tiny totalitarian states?
I think this persists largely because the people atop those tiny states are also the ones behind most of our media apparatus, so they can make it look and feel pretty normal. But that may be a little tinfoil hat of me.
Maybe ranking it on a scale of best to worse is too simplistic a view, and there are reasons this develops. Maybe it is the best option when there is a good leader, thus such structures dominate, much as a government ran by philosopher kings are better. But this only lasts as long as a wise rule is in charge, and it reverts back to a norm, and eventually, due to pure time and chance, enough bad leaders come on board that slowly dismantle the giants, but this happens at a time scale we don't particularly notice due to how much inertia large corporations can have (before we even get into the less pleasant issues like regulatory capture).
I supposed you meant "why doesn't it get challenged"?
Well, look at how long it took for a democratic/Republican system to appear and survive. The French 1st Republic was immediately at war with all of Europe (I am not talking of Napoleon at all here, it was before that, when the French King was executed).
Nowadays, good luck getting any kind of financing with an "alternative" governance model. The banks and investors will either refuse or edge by pushing higher return rates on you. The whole system is conservative.
The adage "democracy is the worst system, apart from all others" only becomes true long-term. There are plenty of short-lived democracies back to antiquity, in the middle of the middle ages, during the Renaissance, the XIXth century... All stamped down by "more efficient" dictatorial empires... That aren't here anymore. You can expect the same in the even more cutthroat corporate environment, where fitting the system buys you leverage.
And don't get me stated on startups: most of them seek only an exist strategy. Very few challenge any existing behemoth. They are basically externalized R&D.
One other question I had but wasn't sure if it would leave my previous post too unfocused is "aren't we a bit too early to determine in our current government systems are really the most effective?" This is something that will be decided by political scientists far removed from the current societies who can see how our current societies evolve.
If you're thinking "that's bad management" then we are in complete agreement. He should have been able to predict this in advance, but evidently he either did not, or is pretending he did not.
The interview is linked in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai...
Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?
Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO
But I'm going to need a citation for this:
> a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI
The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more plausible to me is that budgets were calibrated to spending before agents were actually useful, and late '25/early '26 changed the pattern significantly.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
> assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how
I mean, if I have a sufficiently clear idea of what and how, then surely just coding it manually would work significantly better. Unless maybe I am a painfully slow typer.
Without some level of "actually I'm not sure exactly" permitted, then I'm not really sure what LLMs bring to the table.
If you're just working on a single react component or an algorithm to do stuff with data, there's less chance to amortize the up front planning and verification so it comes out more of a wash.
For example I want to make it so that users receive an email when their password is changed. I can either do it myself, which requires reviewing and remembering code I’ve written five plus years ago and then wiring everything up and obsessing over the wording of the email. Or I can give a two sentence instruction to the AI, work on something more meaningful while it is doing its thing, and then test it in under 60 seconds when it is done.
Features that used to take months are now expected in days. Oh you didn’t merge 40 pull requests and deploy to prod 15 times today? Aren’t you using Opus the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel?! What do you mean it’s hard to review 100 merge requests per day? Just have Claude review it! That’s a PiP.
Oh prod is down because people keep deploying code that nobody even freakin’ read? Just have Claude fix it! What do you mean it’s doesn’t work well? Just burn more tokens or you’re on a PiP.
Surely there wouldn’t be malicious compliance by people that would prefer to use the right tool for the job instead of having this crap shoved down our throats by management by threat of termination.
Does this happen? I’ve never been at a company that measures employee performance by token burn targets. I suspect most companies don’t do that, but I could be wrong obviously.
Token efficiency where instead of the AI burning money at 1:3 instead of 1:5 isn’t quite a winning argument.
GPT5.5 medium is ~20% the cost of Opus and 27% the cost of Sonnet on a task by task basis. That's a material difference.
The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.
My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.
My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.
If you work for NVIDIA, sure, but otherwise, this makes no sense to me.
All that aside, refusal to participate in bullshit doesn't imply some "plan" to bring the company down, it's really just refusing bullshit. It's not "5D bullshit", i.e. a move in the same bullshit game they are refusing
And if you offer someone 5 bucks to help burn down their own house, that of all their friends, so someone can make 5000 bucks, then they might just refuse, not because they have some plan, but precisely because refusal or letting themselves get hollowed out as well is the only option they're given. It's not like any of the hollowed out people listen to them in earnest.
Young people, which is crazy to me, often want some kind of stake and participation in the world rather than being disposable slaves, they want to do work that makes sense, that enables them and others to grow and prosper, in order to prepare them to become stewards of that world later on, which they want to make better and not just exploit, generally. Mostly, some of them of course are assholes or stupid, but in general, people come to this world way less fucked up than the world wants them to be.
I believe it is absolutely ridiculous to have token usage leader boards.
But isn't it also ridiculous for a rational human being to use as many tokens as possible regardless of whether or not that token usage is useful or valuable?
It seems obvious to me that AI service providers make more money the more tokens are used. It also seems obvious to me that companies who sell shovels during a gold rush stand to make a great deal of money, whether or not any gold is found. How is that a good thing writ large?
Anthropic, (and SpaceX), might IPO soon - a move that will grant them access to capital instantly. Capital that comes directly from the retirement plans of all of us.
All I'm saying is if you want to somehow sabotage the game somehow, this is definitely not the right strategy. Political influence would be far more effective.
What am I missing?