The creator argues against the practice of 'tokenmaxxing,' where companies use LLM token usage as a metric for employee productivity. This incentive structure leads employees to generate low-quality 'slop' and wasteful code to inflate their numbers and climb internal leaderboards. Consequently, companies waste financial resources on tokens while AI providers are the only true beneficiaries.
Key Takeaways
Using LLM token counts as a KPI for productivity is counterproductive.
Poor metrics incentivize employees to prioritize quantity (token volume) over quality (actual output).
This practice results in wasted company spend and an increase in low-quality, AI-generated noise.
Description
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Companies are starting to use LLM tokens as a measure of employee productivity. This has got to stop. People are literally creating slop, throwing away generated code and just using wasteful prompts to inflate their token LLM numbers.
In other words, companies are burning all their money on LLM tokens while employees are generating slop to climb the leaderboards, and the only real winner here is the AI providers.
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LINKS
Website: https://www.hassandev.me
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@itshassanaziz?sub_confirmation=1
My Book: https://www.hassandev.me/designing-websites
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Transcript
Auto-generated transcript
Companies are starting to mandate the use of AI with their employees by using a token usage leaderboard. So the employees who use the most tokens are going to be at the top of the leaderboard. And they're going to get rewarded for burning all of the company's money. And this is obviously such a horrible way to measure productive AI usage. It's actually such a horrible way to measure AI usage that we literally have employees who are running throwaway prompts just to inflate their AI usage and climb the leaderboard. Meta, the company behind Facebook, has an internal leaderboard that tracks the token usage of every single employee, right? Their workers are just producing so much throwaway wasteful slop trying to climb the leaderboard that Meta, just in the last 30 days if I'm not mistaken, has used more than $900 million worth of LLM tokens. That's insane. Now, I think they've removed that leaderboard since then, but it just goes to show you how incredibly dumb some of these companies are. Now Microsoft also has an internal dashboard showing the AI usage of every single employee, and I'm pretty sure they haven't actually removed it yet. It's just such a stupid way to track whether your employees are productively using AI or not. It's probably even worse than tracking the lines of code of every single employee. That is just so wasteful. There's employees in these companies who are literally producing work, producing code that they don't intend to use at all, that they just throw it away, right? But it inflates their token usage numbers and so they keep doing it so they can climb that leaderboard Now Salesforce is also mandating AI usage and their way of doing it might just be the worst of them all because they require their employees to spend a hundred bucks on cloud code and 70 bucks a month on cursor. Every single employee, every single month, all coming from the company's budget. And if you don't spend those minimum amounts every single month, you're going to get flagged by their system, right? So obviously these employees are worried about their job security. They don't want to get flagged by this system for using too few AI tokens. So what are they going to do? They're going to send useless prompts. They're going to generate code that they're not going to use and just do all sorts of other wasteful token maxing practices just to inflate their token numbers. And the only real winners here are the companies actually selling the AI tokens. Everyone else is just getting screwed over. The only ones who are winning over here are Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. All these other companies are just burning massive amounts of money on inference costs to produce slop that isn't even getting shipped to users because it is only created to inflate the token usage numbers so the employees don't get flagged by this flawed system. The whole thing is just a big fucking mess. And as much as I love AI and the problems it solves, we are very much living in a big bubble right now and I would be very happy once it pops. That's all for this video. I just found these companies doing this dumb thing and I just had to talk about it. I'm sure you guys have some thoughts of yourself on this topic as well and I'd love to see them in the comments below. So drop it below. Other than that, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. In the meantime, there's going to be some other videos up here on the screen that you can go watch as well.
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