Instagram’s Adam Mosseri has a sobering prediction for Meta’s engineers: the AI tokens they burn through could soon cost the company as much as their salaries.
Over the next year or two, the most capable engineers’ AI token consumption costs could rival their wages or total hiring costs, the Instagram chief said. At that point, Meta may institute per-engineer token caps. Whether an engineer gets a generous or stingy limit will depend on the company’s confidence in a positive return.
Meta hasn’t imposed any limits yet — but it has already pulled the plug on internal token consumption leaderboards. According to Mosseri, those rankings only encouraged engineers to burn tokens without necessarily creating real value. It’s a sign that Big Tech’s AI attitude is shifting from “use more” to “show me the ROI.”