Cognition CEO says tech companies got ‘carried away’ with token leaderboards and should measure employees on output instead

The trend of tokenmaxxing has gone too far. That’s at least according to Cognition CEO Scott Wu, who argues that as companies scramble to rein in AI spending, they should focus on employee productivity instead of AI use.

In an episode of the David Senra podcast, Wu said that as companies are shelling out on token budgets, there needs to be a push to identify how AI is creating real value, which comes from defining clear returns on investment for the technology, including revenue growth, efficiency gains, or cost-saving.

“It is directionally correct, but I think there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away,” Wu said of tokenmaxxing. “People are like, ‘We rank our engineers by how many tokens they’re spending.’ Well, let’s try and rank people by how much output they’re actually producing.”

Cognition measures its success in how much it is able to increase engineering capacity. The AI software company is the creator of Devin, widely considered the first AI coding agent. Financial institutions like Goldman Sachs use the tool as an AI software engineer, while auto companies like Read Entire Article