Instagram’s boss says cutting ‘silly’ AI projects reined in costs fast

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has joined the growing debate over the rising cost of artificial intelligence, revealing that reining in his division’s ballooning AI budget was simpler than expected.

Speaking on a recent episode of ‘Lenny’s Podcast,’ Mosseri told host Lenny Rachitsky that the fix came down to cutting wasteful, early-stage experiments. ‘We’ve managed to get the costs reined in a little bit by shutting down the silly things that we were doing,’ he said, according to Business Insider. He did not name specific projects but noted, ‘It is not that hard to build a token incinerator.’

His comments mark a shift from the early wave of the AI boom, when companies including Meta, Instagram’s parent, were reported to run internal leaderboards tracking and encouraging massive AI token consumption, a trend known as ‘tokenmaxxing.’ Tokens are the basic units of data AI models process, and providers charge businesses based on how many they consume. Asked about the leaderboards now, Mosseri flatly called the practice ‘a terrible idea.’

Mosseri said he now views AI tokens as a standard corporate resource that needs budgeting alongside GPUs, server storage, RAM and payroll. He predicted that within a year or two, ‘the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary or their cost of employment,’ and suggested companies will eventually need to place data caps on workers based on their proven ability to deliver a return on that spending.

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