Ever questioned how productive your coworkers truly are? Meta workers don’t have to guess.
A Meta employee independently created a leaderboard that tracked what number of tokens—the fundamental items of knowledge or phrases that AI fashions course of—the firm’s greater than 85,000 workers used, The Information reported on Monday. Called “Claudeonomics,” after Anthropic’s AI mannequin, the leaderboard confirmed the prime 250 token customers and awarded workers with titles, comparable to “Token Legend” and “Cache Wizard.”
The leaderboard inspired “tokenmaxxing,” a rising phenomenon in Silicon Valley which emphasizes token utilization as a measure of productiveness. While each AI mannequin measures tokens otherwise, OpenAI estimates that one token is equal to about 4 characters and a single one-to-two sentence immediate requires about 30 tokens. Token utilization can suggest if staff are optimizing their prompts, or the variety of AI brokers they’re utilizing.
But now, the enjoyable is over: the inside AI-use leaderboard went down simply two days after the information broke.
The dashboard now reads: “We’ve really enjoyed building this app on Nest for everyone. It was meant to be a fun way for people to look at tokens, but due to data from this dashboard being shared externally, we’ve made the decision to shutter Claudeonomics for now,” reported The Information, which additionally reported the firm has a separate official dashboard for token utilization geared towards software program engineers, who typically use the most tokens.
“The employee took down the dashboard at their discretion; Meta did not request this action,” Meta informed Fortune in a assertion.
Last yr, Meta’s Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told workers that “AI-driven impact” would be a “core expectation” in 2026, in accordance to Business Insider. In January, the firm overhauled its efficiency evaluate system (*1*) the highest performers with upwards of a 200% bonus.
Some workers have put AI brokers to work for hours to maximize their token utilization. Neither Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg nor Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth are in the prime 250 token customers.
In a 30-day interval, complete employee utilization on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, and the highest-ranked particular person user averaged 281 billion tokens. Using the least costly model of Claude Opus 4.6, which costs $5 for each million tokens, that one user alone might have price Meta greater than $1.4 million.
Incentivizing excessive token use is changing into the norm in Silicon Valley. OpenAI has an employee leaderboard, and the firm’s prime energy user used 210 billion tokens over one week in March.
Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has been a main voice on token budgets, shared his vision for token use at Nvidia’s GTC convention in San Jose in March.
“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he stated. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”
Just days later, Huang said he would be “deeply alarmed” if an engineer he paid $500,000 a yr didn’t use not less than $250,000 price of tokens. He didn’t specify the significance of the 50% measure.
Meta CTO Bosworth said his greatest engineer is spending the equal of his wage in tokens, however he’s “5x to 10x more productive.”
“It’s like, this is easy money,” Bosworth stated. “Keep doing it. No limit.”
