Comment by mayhemducks
8 days ago
Excessive token burning as a tactic to annoy your employer probably does the opposite - it probably makes your employer money.
The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.
My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.
My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.
> The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
If you work for NVIDIA, sure, but otherwise, this makes no sense to me.
I'm guessing you aren't invested in any of these stocks. I'm also guessing, to take the perspective of a tokenamxxing GenZ employee, that their bosses are.
Right, because every $100 spent on tokens results in more than $100 of profit from NVIDIA stock. That totally makes sense. But why so indirect, why not buy NVIDIA GPU and trash them? That should increase profit even more, since you're cutting out the middlemen.
All that aside, refusal to participate in bullshit doesn't imply some "plan" to bring the company down, it's really just refusing bullshit. It's not "5D bullshit", i.e. a move in the same bullshit game they are refusing
And if you offer someone 5 bucks to help burn down their own house, that of all their friends, so someone can make 5000 bucks, then they might just refuse, not because they have some plan, but precisely because refusal or letting themselves get hollowed out as well is the only option they're given. It's not like any of the hollowed out people listen to them in earnest.
Young people, which is crazy to me, often want some kind of stake and participation in the world rather than being disposable slaves, they want to do work that makes sense, that enables them and others to grow and prosper, in order to prepare them to become stewards of that world later on, which they want to make better and not just exploit, generally. Mostly, some of them of course are assholes or stupid, but in general, people come to this world way less fucked up than the world wants them to be.
I genuinely do not understand why people think my comment on this is a bad take.
I believe it is absolutely ridiculous to have token usage leader boards.
But isn't it also ridiculous for a rational human being to use as many tokens as possible regardless of whether or not that token usage is useful or valuable?
It seems obvious to me that AI service providers make more money the more tokens are used. It also seems obvious to me that companies who sell shovels during a gold rush stand to make a great deal of money, whether or not any gold is found. How is that a good thing writ large?
Anthropic, (and SpaceX), might IPO soon - a move that will grant them access to capital instantly. Capital that comes directly from the retirement plans of all of us.
All I'm saying is if you want to somehow sabotage the game somehow, this is definitely not the right strategy. Political influence would be far more effective.
What am I missing?