tokenmaxxing is a failed experiment

I want you guys to read this tweet by Mark carefully. A mysterious company burned through 500 million dollars in CLAR LLM tokens in just a single month. All because nobody bothered to set usage limits. Now I tried to find out which company this was but I couldn't find the name. All I could find was this news article on Yahoo Finance. So I guess the one thing this company is good at is hiding their identity. But they literally spent 500 million dollars in a single month just on llm tokens and if you do the math 500 million in a month is basically like spending 16 million in a day like that's insane i don't know what company this is but they must be really fucking lousy if they can't even see 16 million dollars leaving their bank accounts every fucking day and nobody even notices that and that's not all uber ran company leaderboards ranking engineers by how much ai they used not what they actually ship and they ended up burning through their entire 2026 budget by April. As in, they've still got like eight months to go for the year and they've burned through the entire year's budget in the first four months. And the real funny part over here is that they can't even connect it to any consumer features. So where did all that money go? I don't know. Summarizing emails, summarizing long text, I don't even know. Like just complete bullshit, right? They literally didn't build or ship or improve anything about the actual app or product or the user experience at all. And it just gets even more crazy over here. There employees who are literally using enterprise AI models to check the weather Like that where the Uber budget went Basically Something that takes two taps on your phone is now costing your company inexpensive LLM tokens Microsoft dear Microsoft, they've started canceling cloud code licenses to their employees. Why? Because the token bill has just spiraled out of control. And other companies are now starting to lay people off just to pay the AI bill to open AI and then drop it. And this isn't because AI has somehow automated or replace the work this is because they literally have bills to pay to these llm companies and they have to lay people off to pay those bills they're literally firing people just so they have money to pay for all of the tokens they're wasting now i recently made a video titled token maxing needs to shop right here and i talk about this exact behavior right ceos and non-technical managers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on llm tokens and they have no clear consumer benefit to show for it like nobody's winning here not the company not the customer not the employees nobody except i guess open ai and the dropik who are just printing money from all these llm tokens being spent so now let's look at this other tweet by charlie here it turns out that amazon had an ai leaderboard which they have now removed right so they had a leaderboard where they were tracking how many tokens each employee was using and to pretty much nobody nobody's shock they've now removed it because the costs were skyrocketing with no clear payoff or benefit to end users. Like, I just don't understand what these CEOs are even thinking at this point. Like you incentivize your employees to use as much tokens as possible right And then you surprised that your employees are using as much tokens as possible like i wish i had a surprise pikachu face to put over here but you literally incentivized your employees to use as much tokens as possible and now you're surprised that they're using as much tokens as possible what the fuck and starbucks of all companies is getting into ai and they have an ai agent that can't even count coffee cups right like imagine having an ai agent in your coffee shop that can't even count your coffee cups like that's just insane and let's not forget uber who burned through 3.4 billion dollars in just four months so that's the yearly budget that they set for 2026 that we just read in the previous tweet right they burned through such a huge amount in just four months with nothing to show for it and it's such a catastrophic failure that i don't even know where to begin with this like are you seeing the problem here or is it just me companies just rewarding the meaningless consumption of llm tokens instead of actual productive output like this has to stop i've already made a video on this topic and now i have to make another because these managers don't understand what they're doing until they burn through billions of dollars and quick side note about uber here i don't understand how anyone could end up burning through 3.4 billion dollars in LLM tokens and nobody f**king notices that. Like if you do the math this is even worse than this mysterious 500 million dollar company over here. 3 billion in 4 months That literally 28 million every f day Are you seriously telling me that nobody in your entire company noticed 28 million dollars leaving the company budget every fucking day The sheer stupidity of some of these companies is just mind-boggling to me like how do you not notice 28 million dollars leaving your bank account every fucking day? Like you've literally burned through like 200 million dollars in just a week. How do you not even notice that? What the fuck is going on in these companies. Like this is just insane. And the whole notion of trying to track productive AI usage by just looking at the raw LLM tokens is just stupid, right? It's a fool's way of tracking AI usage. Instead of trying to measure AI usage like this, what we should really be doing is look at stuff like what real problems have been solved, what features have been built, and what actual productive output has been achieved by AI, right? And if you notice, none of these things are things that can be tracked just by looking at how many raw LLM tokens you're consuming, right? So the whole tracking raw LLM tokens was just a dumb idea right from the start, right? So we're already starting to see the consequences of this whole token maxing charade. And any company that's still trying to token max is just asking to go bankrupt. That's all I wanted to say in this video. Also, quick self-promo before I end the video. If you're a business owner or a manager and you want to integrate AI into your company without all of the massive cost problems that we discussed in this video, then top link in the description. You can book a call with me right now and I'll personally help you to become an AI-first company. That's all. Thank you for watching. Like, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff.