Comment by simonw
3 hours ago
I expect everyone understood that.
The obvious second effect is that if you have a leaderboard people will compete to top it, by running dumb loops or whatever.
That impacts how much you can learn, and costs you more money than you wanted to spend.
The excessive spending was part of the point. The market is watching AI spend very closely. AI spend is a proxy for AI absorption. Expanding your MS contract to include Copilot for your rank and file doesn't move the meter much. Letting your engineers run up 100k/month shows extreme absorption. The share price increase potentially pays for the entire token bill once Wall Street goes through your earnings.
Not everyone did understand that, you'll see some comments expressing that they've never heard that perspective before, interestingly enough. But yes Goodhart's Law applies.