Credit. Andrea Chronopoulos Reporting from San Francisco Earlier this year, the message from tech companies to employees was clear: Use as much artificial intelligence in your work as possible. Employees called it “tokenmaxxing,” with a token referring to a unit of A. I.
use roughly equal to a word fragment. Employees at Meta and Amazon even competed on leaderboards that tracked token use. Then came the bills from companies, like Anthropic and OpenAI, that provide A. I. tools — and they were not cheap. Now the tokenmaxxing era appears to be over.
Meta told employees last week that it would soon limit A. I. use after seeing an “exponential increase” in costs. In May, Uber said it had blown through its projected A. I. spending for the year in just four months, and it has placed some monthly limits on A. I. coding tools.
Walmart also set limits for different A. I. tools. And Amazon and Meta have taken down the tokenmaxxing leaderboards. In other words, “tokenminning,” short for “token minimizing,” is now in. The reversal, within just a few months, underlines how A. I.
use remains in flux as people try to figure out how to best use the tools. “The biggest problem is this is all changing so fast, people and companies don’t know what to do,” said Rob May, the chief executive of Neurometric, a start-up that helps companies better use A. I.
, and the author of “The Tokenminning Manifesto. ” We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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