ECONOMY

It's not the dumbest trend I've ever seen silicon valley companies fall for. Remember who we're talking about here. And Meta is absolutely not the only company doing this. But it is the dumbest possible thing you can do. If you want to do nothing, and watch your token budgets explode, all you have to do is put 100 agents on a discord server, or slack, or anywhere, where you're running multiple session contexts, and just start talking. That's it. You don't have to work on anything useful. One token turns into 100 tokens, which turns into a million tokens, which turns into billions and trillions of tokens, while literally nothing other than eyeball emojis is created. Meanwhile, it's that very problem of token explosion that's actually worth fixing, and optimizing around. But if you're incentivizing based on nothing other than token budgets…. why would you want to reduce that token count? It's a perverse incentive. I think this is where it really starts to feel like boom times for developers. Across the board, the powers that be are, whether they know it or not, asking us to use AI incorrectly. When the subsidies stop, and people are no longer drunk on money (this is going to happen sooner than we think), efficiency is going to be the order of the day. The people at the top of these leaderboards are going to be fired when the people up top realize that nothing was accomplished, and lean will be the order of the day. I think, given the history of this, that it's only a matter of time before the chopping block comes down. If you're concerned about that, optimize for measures of code quality, and productivity as though loc and token counts did not exist. That's how you survive this. Jyoti Mann (@jyoti_mann1) The highest ranked individual user averaged 281 billion tokens, which could cost millions of dollars, depending on the type of model used. theinformation.com/articles/… — https://nitter.net/jyoti_mann1/status/2041162769643327596#m

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