What happened: Some Amazon staff chased high token counts (the chunks of text an AI reads and writes) because internal leaderboards rewarded usage over results. In May, Amazon shut one down. On Oct 27, a public memo went further.

CNBC

How it played out

Goal: 80%+ of developers using AI weekly.

tomshardware

Some staff reportedly used an in-house agent platform to run needless tasks and boost their numbers.

tomshardware

Every extra token is real compute cost.

What the memo says

Token usage, tool adoption, and code-change counts are “deeply flawed” as targets.

CNBC

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