“Deeply alarmed.” That’s how NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang said he’d feel, at GTC in March, about any $500,000-per-year engineer who wasn’t burning at least $250,000 worth of AI tokens to do their job.I manage engineers. Huang is wrong about this, and the handful of CTOs echoing him publicly probably know it. Token consumption isn’t a measure of engineering productivity. It’s among the worst input metrics the industry has reached for in a generation, and it’s spreading fast.A dashboard that shouldn’t have existedEarlier this month, an engineer at Meta built an internal leaderboard, called Claudeonomics, that ranked all 85,000-plus Meta employees by AI token consumption. The Information broke the story. Over a 30-day stretch, Meta employees had collectively burned more than 60 trillion tokens. The leaderboard gamified the spend with titles like Token Legend, Session Immortal, and Cache Wizard. The top single user averaged 281 billion tokens over the month. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t crack the top…
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