this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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[–] ozoned@piefed.social 92 points 1 day ago (46 children)

Literally was in a presentation at work the other day where they said someone used 2 million tokens and the next person used 1 million and they were so excited by it.

I didn't get it. I asked went 2 million was better than 1 million. The VP basically said it's not, just costs us more money.

So why the hell is the presentation acting like it's a fucking victory?

[–] shuffle3765@sh.itjust.works 16 points 15 hours ago (11 children)

Because it's a proxy metric for adoption. Currently you generally want your engineers to be using it as much as you can afford to so that they all learn and improve and adapt existing processes etc

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Which is a stupid mindset.

"Go forth and burn tokens and your performance will be measured on that"

Looks like I'm going to make a for to ask for a for every word in /usr/share/dict/words. Look at all the tokens I burned.

It doesn't reflect upon business value, performance, or education.

It's even worse than the disastrous lines of code metric.

Their problem is they have no idea what to expect, so to signal affinity to hype, they just measure tokens.

[–] ElegantBiscuit@lemmy.zip 2 points 7 hours ago

It's just managers who have long since abandoned retaining any practical knowledge in the field, if they even had any at all, and pushing what their boss wants to hear and what they have all convinced themselves to be true in the world of management and linkedin lunatics, because that's how you get promoted in management. Because everyone from the top down is all in on AI because those at a high enough level are all chasing a seat at the table of the ownership class holding the keys to the AI kingdom and the stock valuations that come from it.

So if their company or their company's AI model or AI usage makes them an important client of someone that the stock market has deemed important, or if they think their company is the special chosen one that will figure out the secret to AI productivity that none of the other thousands of companies will, that is all that matters. They know nothing about its actual usage, just that more tokens = more usage and therefore must be good, because more usage means their company stock goes up and it that means a bigger golden parachute.

The problem is that either they are genuinely ignorant of the fact that it is a bubble, or they believe that they will be able to time their exit right. The worst part is that a lot of them will, but all the people and the organizational chaos that the burst of the bubble will create that they are knowingly contributing to, well that's some other sucker's problem. And that someone else is everyone, whose power and water bills will go up, whose ram and hard drive prices go up, and whose 401k will tank when the bubble collapses.

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