From Instagram to Uber, tech bosses are questioning their own AI spending

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has become the latest tech executive to publicly question runaway AI spending, joining a growing chorus of leaders reassessing whether the surge in AI bills is actually paying off.

Speaking on a recent episode of ‘Lenny’s Podcast,’ Mosseri said his division reined in its ballooning AI budget by 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 told host Lenny Rachitsky, according to Business Insider.

He is not alone. 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. Companies across the globe are facing surging tech bills, driven by widespread employee adoption and the rise of ‘agentic AI’ tools that require far more processing power.

Mosseri’s comments also mark a cultural shift from the early AI boom, when companies including Meta reportedly ran internal leaderboards tracking massive token consumption, a trend known as ‘tokenmaxxing.’ Asked about the practice now, he called it ‘a terrible idea.’

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 need to introduce data caps for workers based on their proven ability to deliver returns.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by TechCrunch