Jensen Huang has a new red flag for top talent: not using enough AI tokens.
The Nvidia CEO said in an episode of the “All-In Podcast” published Thursday that he would be “deeply alarmed” if one of the chip giant’s top engineers spent too little on AI.
“If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed,” Huang said.
“That $500,000 engineer at the end of the year, I’m going to ask them how much did you spend in tokens? If that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else,” he added.
When asked if Nvidia is spending $2 billion on tokens for its engineering team, Huang said: “We’re trying to.”
“This is no different than one of our chip designers who says, ‘Guess what? I’m just going to use paper and pencil,'” he said, referring to top engineers who underutilize AI tokens.
Earlier this week, Huang said at the GPU Technology Conference that tokens could be part of his recruitment strategy for engineers.
“They’re going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said of engineers. “I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10X.”
“It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens comes along with my job?” Huang added. “And the reason for that is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
Tokens are the basic unit AI systems use to process text. The more text an AI reads or generates, the more tokens it consumes, which is why companies typically charge based on usage per thousand or million tokens.
Tokens as compensation
Huang isn’t alone in pushing the idea that engineers need generous access to AI compute — and that companies should be willing to pay for it.
Business Insider’s Alistair Barr reported earlier this month that tech companies could be experimenting with a new way to compete for talent: offering access to AI inference power alongside salary, bonuses, and equity.
Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures told Barr that tokens are a potential “fourth component” of compensation.
Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at Arena, a startup that measures model performance, suggested that OpenAI and Anthropic “create recruitment sites where their clients can advertise roles, listing the token budget for the job alongside the salary range.”
Thibault Sottiaux, an engineering lead on OpenAI’s Codex team, wrote on X that candidates are increasingly asking how much compute they’ll get access to.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said previously that AI tokens could be a form of universal basic income.
“I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets a slice of GPT-7’s compute,” Altman said in a May 2024 “All-In Podcast” episode. “And they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars but this like slice, you own part of the productivity,”
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