Jensen Huang says he will be ‘deeply alarmed’ if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens
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Jensen Huang says that engineers worth $500,000 must use at least $250,000 worth of tokens, otherwise they risk ringing alarm bells.
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“If that person says $5,000, I’m going to go fake something else,” the Nvidia CEO added.
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Huang suggested giving engineers artificial intelligence tokens worth about half of their annual salary.
Jensen Huang has a new red flag for top talent: not using enough AI tokens.
Nvidia CEO said on Thursday’s episode of the “All-In Podcast” that one of the chip giant’s top engineers would be “deeply alarmed” if it spent too little on artificial intelligence.
“If that $500,000 engineer hasn’t consumed at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I will be deeply alarmed,” Huang said.
“At the end of the year, I’m going to ask that $500,000 engineer how much you spent in coins. If that person says $5,000, I’m going to go fake something else,” he added.
“We’re trying to do that,” Huang said when asked if Nvidia had spent $2 billion on tokens for its engineering team.
“This is no different than one of our chip designers saying, ‘Guess what? I’m just going to use paper and pencil,'” he said, referring to senior engineers who underutilize AI tokens.
Earlier this week, Huang said at the GPU Technology Conference: can be tokens It will be part of the recruitment strategy for engineers.
“They will earn a base salary of several hundred thousand dollars a year,” Huang said of the engineers. “I’ll probably give them half of that in tokens too, so they can be boosted 10x.”
“Now one of these recruitment tools In Silicon Valley: How many tokens come with my job?” Huang added: “And it’s obvious why, because every engineer with access to tokens will be more productive.”
tokens basic unit artificial intelligence systems Use it to manipulate text. The more text an AI reads or produces, the more tokens it consumes; That’s why companies typically charge based on usage per thousand or million tokens.
Huang is not alone in advocating the idea that engineers need generous access to AI computing and companies should be willing to pay for it.
Alistair Barr from Business Insider Earlier this month, it was reported that tech companies might try a new way to compete for talent: Offering salary, bonuses and equity, as well as access to the power of AI inference.
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 recruiting sites where their customers can advertise roles, list the salary range as well as the token budget for the job.”
