OpenAI exec highlights the rising importance of AI compute in tech job compensation.
In other news, Roblox executive thinks that having companies pay employees partly in Robux would be a great idea.
Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation
Submitted 2 weeks ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-compute-compensation-software-engineers-greg-brockman-2026-3
Comments
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
GreenCrunch@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
kreskin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Robux and pedophile-bucks.
VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s a really dumb way to frame what the OpenAI people actually said on this - they are saying that the people applying to them want to know how many tokens they can use as a tool to accomplish the job they are applying for. There’s a fundamental difference to compensation here to compensation, where tokens as compensation would be how many tokens the people applying for the job would be able to utilize for their own purposes, whatever they may be.
To illustrate - I would probably be reluctant to work for a company which would not be willing to spend the amount of money that would get me a more or less top of the line computer with which to perform my job. Not because I consider my company-provided development machine as a part of my compensation - it is merely a tool I use for my job.
The people applying for these jobs are the kinds of people who think that burning an exorbitant amount of tokens will make them quite significantly more productive, so the metaphor of having the best tools available to accomplish the task at hand extends here, in accordance with their belief system.
There’s then the quote from the VC ghouls, but I don’t think anyone could accuse them of being competent to any significant degree, so their quotes are most appropriately used as toilet paper.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Sorry, my mortgage service doesn’t accept AI slop as payment, so I’ll just take the money”
darvocet@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Sorry, Trump just ruled mortgages are illegal.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
God this timeline is so fucking dumb
tomiant@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It’s malicious, not dumb. The dumb is a side effect.
GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Construction companies should pay bricklayers in bricks and mortar
Uber should pay drivers in gas
Restaurants should pay chefs in raw ingredients
This is a radical idea, but maybe employers should be responsible for providing the supplies and tools their employees need to do their jobs? And the employees can just get money in return for their labor?
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
ceos get paid in empty promises and bad decisions?
kreskin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Are arse reamings something they buy and sell, or a form of currency for ceo’s? What about female CEOs? (not that its a huge problem-- maybe those few old-guard female ceos just pay you in money).
matlag@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
“People like you aren’t in for the money!” – always and only said by people who are in for the money
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
employees can just get money
There’s your problem, right there, money is dangerous, can’t let the rabble have money - they might get too much and then they’d have power, power to disrupt the people who have money…
IronBird@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tbh, i always wondered by contruction industry types werent also paid in housing. like build X highrises you get a unit in one of said highrises
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
AI companies who can’t find anyone to buy their product, swear their employees would rather have their product in exchange for labor rather than money…
Which could easily be used to buy the product no one outside the company is buying.
This is just a way to juice metrics and claim this “compensation” as sales on the books.
And I’m almost positive the “per user growth” they’re talking about is just how brain rot addicts will use chatbots for everything once their brain atrophies from not using it. But just by mentioning that they had to admit that overall use wasn’t a metric they wanted to talk about.
It’s like how a small percentage of drinkers (the alcoholics) buy the vast amount of alcohol. Less people drinking is bad for the company, and a few alcoholics can’t sustain the company without being replaced by new addicts.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
Sort of. It was more of a crypto token and the competitor was buying them all up so they could control over 50% and effectively break Pied Piper’s system.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s been a minute, but I thought the tokens represented compute time
But then they realized people valued the idea of compute time more than the compute time.
So it became similar to crypto, where it was just used as a currency.
The part about gaining control I thought was something else, where Pied Piper didn’t have 50% of accounts on an app, just a majority. And due to the decentralized nature of their software, whoever had the majority controlled the code. So the Chinese and Gavin set up a zombie network of bot phones to gain 50% in a hostile takeover once the boys were switched from independent accounts to an organization.
But like I said, it’s been a minute and sometimes I’m wrong.
But I think they were two separate iterations of what the company was at the time
kreskin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Maybe instead of food we can be paid in ozempic (to reduce appetite) and a very very tiny amount of food. all humanity would become very skinny, and then theres less health care costs due to obesity.
I should really be in charge here.
Tharkys@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
So that is why people think Grey aliens are just future humans! They took too much Ozempic and now they need to harvest genes from us to fix their own DNA.
XLE@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Imagine having tech employees beg their employers for a work computer. That’s basically what this article is suggesting.
I see a big silver lining on this cloud though: unlike a work computer, apparently AI subscriptions are not self-evidently worth having:
“It is starting to happen,” Tunguz told me, as employee use of AI increasingly contributes to total cash burn. “It is a consideration for the Office of the CFO.”
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
unlike a work computer, apparently AI subscriptions are not self-evidently worth having
Back in the 1980s it was highly debatable if there was value in desktop PCs beyond playing Solitare.
XLE@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
1981 was the year of the IBM PC, which was produced for 6 years and became a staple in the business world. Third-party software became widely available within a year. They were famous for the quality of the documentation.
Basically the opposite is true for AI’s flagship LLMs, for every one of rise things. The creators are unable to make money, investors are getting nervous, their functionality is poorly explained to businesses, the list goes on.
entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Corporate owned media promoting a story about making you rely on tokens to outwork your coworkers so you don’t lose your job is the dumbest shit I’ve ever read.
FireWire400@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: Slavery
FIFY
Kirp123@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s slavery but with AI. (Silicon Valley execs foaming at the mouth from excitement)
MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So let me get this straight. Companies were like “instead of paying one senior dev 300k and 5 junior devs 150k, we can get rid of all the junior devs and give the senior dev AI to do all of the legwork thus saving us 750k.”
And then they found out that AI costs money. So instead of ponying up the 100k in tokens for the senior dev to to their job, they are saying “Hey senior dev, we are taking away your bonus and replacing it with tokens! You can take it or be out of a job, because we refuse to keep anybody on board who doesn’t use AI to replace 5 junior devs”
So these cheap fucks saved 750k, and are upset with the fact that they might only save 650k?
While also destroying the planet to generate shitty code.
I fucking hate this time line.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Gee guys… Did you maybe build a whole bunch of compute capacity for a product no one actually wants, and now you have to find a way to use it for something?
etherphon@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
These dudes seriously seem to have zero clue about being a human being.
kreskin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
being a human being is for the peasants.
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hey you know what I could use to buy compute or literally anything else
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Fuck sake, dont you all get it. The point in this kind of AI is massive data harvesting and tie it all together.
It wont go away, because that would mean you’ll get some privacy back. You wont.
krimson@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They are going full panic mode now. The crash has already begun.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Trump bombed the bubble.
ChadGPT2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I remember when silicon valley used to build products that would help people improve their lives.
The reaper or capitalist enshittification comes for all industries eventually.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
There was a brief, coincidental alignment of silicon valley’s goals and human progress.
ChadGPT2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
well put
evol@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
When was this
PushButton@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Now, some tech job candidates have begun asking about what AI compute budget they will have access to if they decide to join. “I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex,” Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI’s Codex, the startup’s AI coding service, wrote on X recently.
Big fucking bullshit. No one ever ask for “AI compute budget”, people wants money. Not your coffee, not your foosball game, money.
Guess what you can buy with money? Yeah, that compute time, if desired.
What a fucking load of bullshit.
evol@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
They are talking about like internal quotas I believe? Like my friends company is limited to 1000 in spend per month while I have no cap and will blow through 2k in a week if I’m working long hours.
Avicenna@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Don’t pay people enough money, expect them to buy your products with their non existent money.
SarahValentine@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Awesome! Now they can lose money and get wrong answers at the same time!
Antaeus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How about compensation for making all hardware so expensive? How about compensation to artists for violating their work to train your precious models? How about compensation for the CO2 that they are spewing into to atmosphere?
vane@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
With Levels.fyi pegging the 75th percentile software engineer salary at $375,000, Tunguz estimates that adding $100,000 in annual inference costs brings the fully loaded cost to $475,000 — meaning just over 20% of the compensation cost could come from AI usage in the future.
and later
Tunguz has been building AI tools and models into his daily workflow and is automating 31 tasks a day at a cost of about $12,000 a year in inference.
This article is insane and proves me more that AI product for rich people. Most of developers won’t see $100k in their lifetime.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This article is insane and proves me more that AI is product for rich people. Most of developers won’t see $100k per year paycheck in their lifetime.
These days an annual salary of $100k is at the very low end for IT jobs in the USA. Even in my MCOL area $125k-$200k is more common.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I really, really would like to see what tasks he is automating.
Diurnambule@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
You can look on n8n what is successfull. It give some idea
entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Oh my god Iran. Just send the drones already
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Well, this is a fresh kind of hell…
db2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Like all their ideas this one is also recycled.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
The only thing they do that isn’t increasing pollution
itsathursday@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s like a grift card, only redeemable by the employer with your time, without the card.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hey. AI. Go to the store and buy me food.
Hmmm. Doesn’t work.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What a bunch of fucking idiots.
ieatpwns@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Salary is 64GB of virtual ram
Sims@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Ha. Succumbing to Ads, selling their AI super-weapon to the most insanely violent US Fascist regime, and now trying to use compute as payment for staff and whatnot. They are really doing great :-)
I can’t wait for the lazy/scammy shareholders to lose all their stolen value…
Sims@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
…that said, ‘compute’ - maybe as tokens - can become a universal payment system in the future. The token ‘economy’ is already way bigger than all cryptoscams combined (+ hash compute -> worthless vs tokens) and it will become almost as essential as electricity. Let’s hope big tech …ychos doesn’t benefit from that development…
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Can’t they just pay me in NFTs?
fisch@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But that’s just crypto again, isn’t it? They tried the same bullshit.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“You can spend your scrip at the company store.”
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You burn 16 tokens and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Tell Berners Lee that I can’t go
Lexam@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For the company.