Telling people “use more ai” was always a profoundly stupid direction. “Ship more stuff faster, use AI if it helps, get paid the same” would be anti-labor but at least sensible.
If selling widgets the customer probably doesn’t care if you used a screwdriver or a drill. They just want their widget. Mandating drill usage is stupid.
That capex number in the article is a big part of it. $200 billion spent to generate $1-2 billion a month in revenue is wasteful, and people at the top are feeling the pressure to justify that expense.
The people who need the line to keep going up rely on other smaller lines to always keep going up.
At my job they’ve explicitly called out AI Usage and Aptitude as a core requirement for performance. So you are damn right I am juicing numbers up.
You’ll be the first type of human I’d cut off from water and electricity supply if I were in charge of that sort of thing in the future. Sorry. 😢
I’d cut me off too
In that case, you’re failing to diagnose the problem.
The human causing these problems are not the humans doing actual productive work (+/- AI usage).
The ones you look for are the ones who exercise executive control over the entire organization.
Attacking the working class for using AI as directed is like being angry at two knuckles on someone’s right fist because they punched you in the face.
Reminds me of a job I had where we got scored based on the number of issues closed. Suddenly, every minor typo or style disagreement became its own issue. We’d close hundreds of issues a day wordsmithing on comments.
Well that’s what happens when you make it part of your performance review.
Nice example of Goodhart’s law in action.
Tokenistic usage of a tokenised metric
Tax the shit out of data centers. Let them pay for the infrastructure they use and all this nonsense goes away.
Usage score? Retarded executive management.
i hope the people pushing this bullshit are identified and will have their water and energy tokens reduced accordingly in our post-apocalyptic ecototalitarian future.
The Great Silicon Valley Token Fire of 2026 continues.
Next steps? The bosses start using the AI tools to summarize the usage of the emoyees to make sure they are using it for the right things. Then employees start subtly prompt injecting their bosses LLM to give them more favorable usage scores. And the sea boils as the arms race to see who can burn more tokens to make investors happy.
Next steps? AI does the bosses job and operates the AI tools.
Shocking!!
They want to find the best tokenist!
It’s what I’m doing.
