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. In May, the Information reported that Meta was developing something called Hatch, which would be Meta’s own OpenClaw-like agentic AI platform—a consumer-friendly version of the exact type of token-guzzling agentic platform that had helped give rise to the tokenmaxxing trend in the first place.
According to Wired’s story, alongside the apparent sunsetting of tokenmaxxing incentives, Meta “has been encouraging—but not requiring—employees to use its most advanced AI experiment.” That experiment is Hatch, which still hasn’t been released, but employees have had access “for the past several weeks,” Wired claims. The tool apparently consumes more AI tokens than standard chatbots and AI coding tools. Some apparently like using Hatch, but some of Wired’s sources point to a news event from April, in which it emerged that Meta planned to use employee keystrokes to train AI, as a reason to be wary of the new tool. (Meta later paused that program).
And it’s simply a fact that heavy use if AI agents is still part of Meta’s workplace culture. For instance, a memo earlier this week from AI chief Alexandr Wang explained the company’s switch from Google Chat to Slack was to further enable the use of AI agents. Slack, he wrote is “the strongest platform available today for agents.” Even though “not all of us are building agents today,” Wang wrote, “everyone at the company will benefit from a robust and useful agent ecosystem.”
If Hatch is a success internally, according to Wired, the fear is that layoffs will soon follow. According to a Reuters report from last week, Meta planned to cut up to 60% of its workforce in certain areas. According to that report, the plan never moved forward due to bugs in the AI software that would have taken over for dismissed employees.
Gizmodo reached out to Meta for information about the Reuters report, and about internal testing of Hatch. We did not receive a reply.
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