Meta minimizes role of token maxing in employee evaluations

AI consumption and AI impact are not the same. Meta won’t judge employees by how much they use AI when it comes to annual performance reviews, despite early efforts to drive AI adoption focusing on so-called token maxing. The company has told employees that it “will not use AI adoption dashboards or token counts to evaluate impact,” according to a report by The Information. The announcement came in an internal memo from executives Maher Saba and Santosh Janardhan, which said that instead of measuring AI usage, “managers should look at output quality, velocity, problem complexity and scope taken on.” This marks a culture change for Meta, where engineers had previously competed to consume the most AI tokens, displaying their scores on a leaderboard. Meta then discovered that its employees were being diverted from regular work because they were using AI to carry out additional tasks to boost their scores. Amazon had similar results when it implemented a leaderboard to track AI use; it also found that some employees were trying to game the system by using AI to complete unnecessary tasks, and it has now deleted it. The company, however, does also monitor employees’ use of AI for training purposes, in a program introduced in April, but this is information was not used to measure employee performance. Meta had already started to look askance at the concept of using AI metrics as a tool to assess employees. Earlier this year, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told employees in a memo that “nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them,” adding that “token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind.”