Counting Bullets: Why Token Burn Is the Wrong...

Meta and OpenAI are running internal leaderboards. Not for commits shipped, or bugs fixed, or products launched. For tokens consumed. One OpenAI engineer reportedly burned through 210 billion tokens in a single week — the equivalent of reading 33 Wikipedias, processed and discarded. This is apparently now a performance metric worth tracking. The phenomenon has a name: tokenmaxxing. Gizmodo called it like telling soldiers to gauge their battlefield success by the number of bullets fired. They're