Artificial intelligence is no longer an option when it comes to work. Almost every company now wants employees to go all-in on AI. And this includes the entertainment giant Disney, which recently laid off around 1,000 workers. The company now wants employees to compete against one another on how much AI they are using, and one person seems to be “tokenmaxxing” Claude.
Artificial intelligence is no longer an option when it comes to work. Almost every company now wants employees to go all-in on AI. And this includes the entertainment giant Disney, which recently laid off around 1,000 workers. The company now wants employees to compete against one another on how much AI they are using, and one person seems to be “tokenmaxxing” Claude.
51,000 times a day, is it even possible?
The report states that the Disney employee who was leading this dashboard had used Anthropic’s Claude – one of the most popular AI models – roughly 4,60,000 in nine days. This translates to an average use of 51,000 times a day! Not including weekoffs either, so the daily use may be even higher.
But is this actually possible? Well, it depends on the work you do. While we don’t know how Disney tracks the leaderboard, it is likely that every prompt given to Claude may count as one-time use. Irrespective of how the dashboard tracks the whole thing, it is fair to say that this AI pioneer inside Disney is using Claude for perhaps everything they can.
And this might be the best way to make yourself safe from being replaced by AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously claimed that employees should be evaluated based on the tokens they consume. He said, “If [a] $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.”
But AI tokens can be expensive
The concept of ‘tokenmaxxing’ is not unique to Disney. Companies like Meta and Visa have previously implemented AI usage dashboards. Meta has reportedly removed the dashboard that employees referred to as ‘Claudeonomics.’
Now, this may sound like a good way for a company to ensure that employees are using AI at work. But this comes at a cost. AI tokens are not cheap, and often companies may need to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars just to buy enough tokens to get work done.
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga recently claimed that the company’s budget for AI was already drained. He told The Information, “I’m back to the drawing board, because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already.”