In a recent interview, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he can see a time in the future, perhaps only a year or two, when putting limits on Meta employees\u2019 AI token spend will become necessary. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think that you can imagine, at least in a year or two \u2026 that the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary, or their cost of employment. And in that world, you\u2019re going to probably need to put in some caps,\u201d the Meta executive said, while speaking<\/a> on Lenny\u2019s Podcast.<\/p>\n AI token spend, a reference to the cost of processing AI prompts and responses, has been a much-buzzed-about subject<\/a> in recent days. Meta shut down an internal AI token spend leaderboard<\/a> after AI costs put the company on track for billions<\/a> of dollars in 2026.<\/p>\n Meta is not alone in rethinking its approach to AI experimentation. Uber also had an AI reckoning<\/a> after it blew through its 2026 AI coding budget by April. Soaring token costs saw Microsoft cancel<\/a> Claude Code licenses, consolidating its engineers around its own Copilot CLI tool instead.<\/p>\n Mosseri\u2019s belief, he explained, is that AI token costs will have to be managed just like any other resource, offering an analogy to things like payroll or operating expenditure (OpEx), which is the day-to-day costs of running a business.<\/p>\n \u201cI think of it like\u2026any other resource,\u201d Mosseri said. \u201cI have to decide how to deploy capacity to my different teams because I have a limited number of GPUs and CPUs and storage and RAM etc. I have to decide how to deploy OpEx for labeling budgets across my teams. I have to decide how to deploy payroll for headcount across my teams.\u201d<\/p>\n Token budgets will be the same, he added, noting that the cap per engineer would have to be proportional to the company\u2019s trust in their ability to use the budget in an \u201cROI-positive\u201d way. <\/p>\n Meta doesn\u2019t currently have token caps for any employee, Mosseri said, but he believes that their use could be healthy in the future. Further down the road, he expects token costs to come down as the AI model makers enter a pricing war to attract people to use their tools over their competitors. <\/p>\n For now, the company has managed to rein in its token costs a bit by shutting down the \u201csilly things\u201d that it was doing, Mosseri noted \u2014 like that token spend leaderboard. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not that hard to build a token incinerator, and that doesn\u2019t create a lot of value,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n