Instagram boss Adam Mosseri joins rising AI costs debate, says company shut down ‘silly things’ that helped …

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has joined the ongoing debate over the skyrocketing costs of artificial intelligence (AI). He shared how his division managed to reduce the ballooning AI budget by cutting out wasteful, early-stage experiments.

Speaking on a recent episode of “Lenny’s Podcast,” Mosseri revealed that curbing his department's initial overspending was actually quite simple. “We've managed to get the costs reined in a little bit by shutting down the silly things that we were doing,” Mosseri told host Lenny Rachitsky (via Business Insider). While he did not name any specific projects that were axed, he noted, “It is not that hard to build a token incinerator.”

The death of ‘Tokenmaxxing’

Mosseri’s comments mark a cultural shift in Silicon Valley. During the early wave of the AI boom, companies heavily participated in a trend known as “tokenmaxxing” – often using internal leaderboards to track and encourage massive AI data consumption. In AI models, tokens are the basic units of data used to process information, and top tech providers charge businesses based on how many tokens they consume.Meta, Instagram's parent company, was historically reported to be one of the largest firms using these token leaderboards.

When asked about them now, Mosseri flatly called the practice “a terrible idea.”Now, companies across the globe are facing surging tech bills, which is being driven by widespread employee adoption and the rise of “agentic AI” tools that require far more processing power. Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, recently made headlines by raising similar alarms, questioning whether Uber's massive AI spending was actually producing meaningful business results.Mosseri views AI tokens as a standard corporate resource that must be budgeted alongside physical hardware like graphics cards (GPUs), server storage, RAM and traditional payroll. In fact, he predicts a near future where an employee's data usage could rival their actual paycheck.“I think that you can imagine, at least in a year or two coming, that the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary or their cost of employment,” Mosseri warned.To prevent budgets from spiraling out of control, the Instagram chief suggested that companies will eventually need to place strict data caps on workers, distributed based on an employee's proven ability to deliver a positive return on the investment.