Artificial intelligence is changing how engineers work at tech companies, but it has also created what analysts are calling an “expensive status game”. According to a report by New York Times, engineers at Meta, OpenAI and other big tech firms are now competing based on how much they use AI tools, measured in “tokens,” which are units of data processed by AI systems. This trend, being referred to as “tokenmaxxing,” is leading to high costs as employees use large amounts of AI resources to show productivity and stay competitive at work.“A.I. was supposed to help tech companies boost productivity and cut costs. But it has also created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are,” NYT report says.
What is tokenmaxxing
Tokenmaxxing is a trend where engineers try to maximize their use of AI tools by processing large amounts of data, known as tokens. In this trend, workers run multiple AI agents or tools at the same time to increase their output and show higher productivity. This often leads to higher usage of computing resources and costs.At companies like OpenAI, Meta and Shopify, AI usage is being increasingly tracked. So much so that some teams use internal leaderboards to show how many tokens each employee consumes. “Generous “token budgets” are becoming a job perk for coders, like dental insurance or free lunch, and some are spending thousands of dollars a month trying to automate as much of their own work as possible,” the report states.“If you have some continuously running agents, you’ll do 700 million tokens a week from a single full-time agent,” said Ege Erdil, a co-founder of Mechanize, an AI start-up, who estimated his own token consumption at between one billion and 10 billion a week. “It doesn’t really take that much.”
Rising costs and competition due to AI
Heavy AI usage is leading to high expenses. At Anthropic, one user reportedly generated a bill of over $150,000 in a month. Some engineers are also spending large amounts to automate their work.Max Linder, a software engineer in Stockholm says “I probably spend more than my salary on Claude”.However, some employees have raised concerns about whether this trend is sustainable. “It doesn’t seem sustainable,” said one OpenAI employee speaking anonymously to the publication. At the same time, experts say not using AI tools could become a career risk.“Inside large tech companies, it’s becoming a career risk to not use A.I. at an accelerated pace, regardless of output quality,” said Gergely Orosz, a software engineering analyst.
