A bad metric becomes a target, the bill comes due, and we end up paying for it twice – once in dollars, once in degraded service.
At Meta, engineers reportedly burned through 60.2 trillion AI tokens in 30 days. At Anthropic API rates, that’s around $900M. The cause: an internal “Claudeonomics” leaderboard ranking engineers by token consumption, thereby encouraging them to inflate their numbers. Meta isn’t alone – similar AI usage dashboards currently run or did run at Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify, and others. Meta has since taken the leaderboard down.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, adding fuel to such a bad metric, declared that he’d be “deeply alarmed” if a $500K engineer consumed less than $250K in tokens annually. Not without his own interest in mind – Nvidia sells the GPUs.
We have been here before.
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