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Tech Employees Are Reportedly Being Evaluated by How Fast They Burn Through LLM Tokens
EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING
https://gizmodo.com/tech-employees-are-reportedly-being-evaluated-by-how-fast-they-burn-through-llm-tokens-2000736627 [gizmodo.com]
According to a column [nytimes.com] by the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, employees at companies including Meta and OpenAI compete on “internal leaderboards that show how many tokens[…]each worker consumes.” At Meta in particular (and also Shopify), Roose says volume of A.I. used has become a metric that goes into people’s evaluations, with managers “rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t.”
Analogies are tricky here. One is tempted to say it’s like making painters compete to use the most paint, but even if the paint is just being splattered as quickly as possible, it’s at least going to be visible when the project is done. It’s a bit more like telling soldiers to gauge their battlefield success by the number of bullets fired, but suppressive fire that doesn’t hit anything has its place in war strategy. The best analogy I can come up with is this: it’s like NBA mascots being evaluated by how many t-shirts they fire out of their t-shirt cannons, but the t-shirts are made by Hermès [theawl.com].
The resulting numbers, in terms of both tokens and money, are absolutely staggering. One OpenAI engineer, according to Roose, burned through 210 billion tokens, which Roose equates to 33 Wikipedias. A Swedish software engineer claims to Roose that his company spends more than his salary on his Claude Code tokens alone.
This “tokenmaxxing” trend clearly stems in part from the use of “claws [gizmodo.com],” agentic AI platforms like OpenClaw, which are this year’s biggest supposed innovation in AI. OpenClaw’s virality was part of the big shift away from OpenAI’s GPT models and toward Claude this year by AI fanatics, and OpenAI subsequently hired OpenClaw’s creator [gizmodo.com], seemingly in a bid to maintain its position as the industry leader.
But even when used without an external claw platform Claude Code is becoming more and more like OpenClaw lately, with a feature rolling out last week that allows greater and greater on-the-go vibe coding, by letting users communicate with Claude Code more easily on their phones.
