This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.

A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.