Move Over, Unlimited PTO: The New ‘Must-Have’ AI Perk Taking Over Silicon Valley |
Move Over, Unlimited PTO: The New ‘Must-Have’ AI Perk Taking Over Silicon Valley
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proposes offering engineers token budgets for AI use.
BY KAYLA WEBSTER, STAFF EDITOR
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images
If you’re a tech company looking to hire talented engineers, base pay and equity payouts may not be enough to get candidates to join your company.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted a new must-have perk will emerge in Silicon Valley: AI token budgets. Engineers need tokens to use AI for complicated projects—the average consumer does not need them to ask AI questions or to generate images.
At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference on Monday, Huang argued that being upfront with the amount of tokens engineers will be allotted to do their jobs will be expected during job interviews and when offers are made. At Nvidia, Huang said he’s considering offering engineers half of their base pay in tokens “so that they could be amplified 10X,” Business Insider reported.
Tokens are small pieces of text that AI reads or writes. They can be made from whole words, or parts of words. AI companies use them to measure how much work the AI has done on behalf of a user. So, the longer your prompt, the more tokens it needs to process the request. It’s worth noting that there aren’t an unlimited number of tokens—they need to be created. And that’s why they’re valuable.
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It may seem strange for workers outside of tech that a token budget will appear in an offer letter alongside compensation, but it actually gives job candidates valuable information about the job they want. Huang explained that engineers want to work at a company where they can be efficient and have room to experiment with new ideas.
“It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens comes along with my job?” Huang said. “And the reason for that is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI’s Codex, an AI coding platform, posted on X that AI tokens are in short supply, and the demand is growing.
“I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex,” Sottiaux’s post reads.
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