In a recent interview, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said he can see a time in the future, perhaps only a year or two, when it will become necessary to put limits on Meta employees’ AI token spending.
“I think you can imagine, at least in a year or two … that a power engineer’s burn rate might be the same as their salary or their employment cost. And in that world, you’re probably going to have to put some caps,” the Meta executive said, while speech on Lenny’s Podcast.
AI token spend, a reference to the cost of processing AI prompts and responses, has been a hotly debated topic in recent days. Meta is closed an internal AI token spending leaderboard since the cost of artificial intelligence put the company on track billions dollars in 2026.
Meta isn’t alone in rethinking its approach to AI experimentation. Uber also had an AI reckoning after exceeding its 2026 AI coding budget by April. At the height of the symbolic costs they saw Microsoft cancellation Claude Code licenses, consolidating its engineers around its own Copilot CLI tool.
Mosseri’s belief, he explained, is that AI contract costs should be managed like any other resource, offering a ratio to things like payroll or operational expenses (OpEx), which are the day-to-day costs of running a business.
“I think about it like … any other source,” Mosseri said. “I need to decide how to deploy capacity across my teams because I have a limited number of GPUs and CPUs, storage and RAM, etc. I need to decide how to deploy OpEx to tag budgets across my teams. I need to decide how to deploy payroll for the number of employees in my teams.”
The token budgets will be the same, he added, noting that the cap per engineer should be commensurate with the company’s confidence in its ability to use the budget in an “ROI-positive” way.
Meta doesn’t currently have caps on any employee, Mosseri said, but he thinks their usage could be healthy going forward. Down the line, he expects token costs to drop as AI model makers enter a price war to get people to use their tools against their competitors.
For now, the company has managed to curb its token spending a bit by shutting down the “stupid things” it was doing, Mosseri noted — like this token spending leaderboard.
“It’s not that hard to build a symbolic incinerator, and it doesn’t create much value,” he said.
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