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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang became one of the first CEOs to use token issuance as a recruiting strategy.
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Huang said engineers will soon ask “How many tokens will my work bring?”
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Huang said that in addition to base salary, Nvidia engineers can also receive tokens equal to half of their annual salary.
Nvidia’s CEO is launching a novel perk to attract talent: tokens.
During a two-hour keynote speech at the GPU Technology Conference on Monday, Huang said he could see a future where every engineer would need an annual token budget, and he would be willing to provide it.
“They will make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which is their base salary,” said engineer Huang. “On top of that, I’ll probably give them half as tokens so they can scale up 10x. Of course, we will.”
“It’s now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens will my job bring?” Huang added. “The reason is very clear, because every engineer who has access to the token will be more efficient.”
A token is a small piece of text that the AI reads or writes, usually about the size of a fraction of a word. AI companies use tokens as economic units to measure the amount of computational work done by AI. The longer the text, the more tokens required to process it, so pricing is typically based on cost per thousand or million tokens.
Jen-Hsun Huang became one of the first high-profile CEOs to publicly discuss the company’s token budget. He made the remarks during a keynote primarily for developers, saying that Blackwell and Vera Rubin will have $1 trillion in purchase orders between them by 2027 as they are able to generate more tokens.
Business Insider’s Alistair Barr previously reported that Silicon Valley is using artificial intelligence reasoning capabilities to come up with new ways to compete for talent on top of traditional salaries, bonuses and equity. Barr wrote that investors are now noticing tokens as the “fourth component” in hiring, and some have told Barr they believe companies should clearly outline their token budgets in job postings.
Thibault Sottiaux, director of engineering at OpenAI’s Codex (artificial intelligence coding service), recently wrote on X that AI computing is becoming increasingly scarce and valuable.
“In candidate interviews, I am increasingly asked how much specialized inferential computing they need to build using Codex,” Sottiaux wrote.
Read the original article on Business Insider
