Satya Nadella is trying to rein in the tokenmaxxers at Microsoft

Satya Nadella has a message for Microsoft’s AI-pilled employees: Not every problem needs the most powerful AI model.

At a live taping of The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Microsoft’s CEO was asked how much tokenmaxxing is happening inside the company.

“A lot,” Nadella said, before cohost Casey Newton could finish the question.

“I’m a tokenmaxxer too, it’s addictive,” Nadella said. “But you have to step back when the novelty wears off to say, ‘What is it that I’m trying to create?'”

Silicon Valley executives have spent the past year pushing workers to use AI as much as possible, sometimes through internal leaderboards that track tokens, the units of data processed by AI systems. Now that the bills are due, companies are putting AI use on a diet.

Nadella did not say Microsoft is limiting employees’ AI use, but he said workers should use the right model for the job.

“Don’t use frontier models for non-frontier problems,” Nadella said, pointing…