Meta Is Reportedly Sending Mixed Messages to Employees on Tokenmaxxing

Imagine you work a weird job where you fire guns at targets all day. At one point you were told your value to the company would be tied to how many bullets you fired, so you pulled the trigger like crazy. What if, when that caused a bullet supply issue, you eventually received a memo saying you were no longer expected to fire as many bullets as possible. But what if, around that same time, you were given the minigun from Terminator 2: Judgement Day ?

According to Wired , something a little like that is happening with AI at Meta.

A March Kevin Roose column in the New York Times clued most of the world into the idea that certain AI-happy workplaces, including Meta, and also OpenAI, were attempting to maximize AI usage among staff—thus the term “tokenmaxxing.” Roose alluded to the popular (at the time) token-chugging agentic AI platform OpenClaw as a potential driver of the trend. Roose said Meta was “rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t.” The report also mentioned leaderboards, which turned AI profligacy into a competition.

A few month later, in June, a report from the Financial Times said Google was throttling Meta’s AI tokens, forcing the company to rethink tokkenmaxxing to some extent. Now tokenmaxxing, it seems, is officially on its way out. The Information reported Wednesday that Meta engineers had received word that “AI adoption dashboards” and “token counts” would no longer be part of evaluations.

Wired, informed by anonymous Meta insiders, says newly published performance review guidance for Meta employees no longer makes “usage of AI” a criterion for assessment. When describing desired outcomes, the new guidance apparently says they “can be supported by AI or other means.” Some of Wired’s sources in Meta say they’re relieved to not feel under pressure to make constant use of AI.

But as all this has been happening Meta has also been trying to make a competitive AI tool of its own.

Back in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg said , “This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.” It’s not clear that that ever happened with Meta’s ChatGPT-style app. Personally I can say that I used the Meta AI web app exactly once, for a story . Amanda Siberling of TechCrunch apparently also used Meta AI for a story, although she had a worse experience because Instagram notified her friends that she was using it, and they made fun of her .

It seems Meta may be hoping its luck will be better with a productivity-focused tool, rather than one oriented toward the same market as ChatGPT.