Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-compute-compensation-software-engineers-greg-brockman-2026-3Open linkView original on feddit.org221
Comments99https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-compute-compensation-software-engineers-greg-brockman-2026-3Open linkView original on feddit.org
“You can spend your scrip at the company store.”
You burn 16 tokens and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Tell Berners Lee that I can't go
For the company.
In other news, Roblox executive thinks that having companies pay employees partly in Robux would be a great idea.
Yeah, I make 100,000 robux per year, get in bitches
Robux and pedophile-bucks.
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.
"Sorry, my mortgage servicer doesn't accept AI slop as payment, so I'll just take the money"
Sorry, Trump just ruled mortgages are illegal.
God this timeline is so fucking dumb
It's malicious, not dumb. The dumb is a side effect.
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?
ceos get paid in empty promises and bad decisions?
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).
"People like you aren't in for the money!" -- always and only said by people who are in for the 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...
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
I can't wait till these companies start falling over so I can stop hearing about their ridiculous shit
It starts to sound like the Romans giving out VIP seats for the Colosseum while you see the smoke and the first flames on the horizon.
We've had smoke on the horizon for a long time now but the fire never comes. We've all learned that smoke and screams is just normal.
If you have a 401k, selling "Large-Cap" indexes or "Full market" indexes can help. (and buying something else, don't leave it uninvested, obviously).
What’s the expression? Markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain sane… or something like that.
or longer than you can remain solvent...
Yeah man, we're going to have AI everything, we'll all exist in a metaverse, and everything will be run from tablet computers that we can access from our car as it drives us to and from work, where we will work way fewer hours. Employees will still have to physically show up to work I'm afraid.
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.
Edit:
Also, isn't this literally a plot point from Silicon Valley?
Like, their desperation move to get funding at some point was handing out compute tokens, but the only people who wanted to buy it was their competitors because non of the companies had customers?
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
Back in the 1980s it was highly debatable if there was value in desktop PCs beyond playing Solitare.
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.
Because it was so easily reproduced, well documented, and open to all vendors to build accessories for or clones of.
And, yet, for the first 10+ years of PCs and clones on the market, many were sitting idle on workers' desks because the workers didn't know how to do anything productive with them, beyond playing solitare.
Starting with the fact that AI's LLMs are mostly being produced / consumed as cloud services rather than a chunk of capital equipment taking up a big part of people's desks.
IBM marketed thier PCs very effectively and launched with a Billion dollar boom, but then lost market share and ultimately lost their ability to sell PCs and/or accessories profitably.
However, IBM's entry to the market with a billion dollar bang later went on to inspire the .com bubble, which started with absurdity of valuations and eventually corrected into the more realistic world dominating market that it is today.
Will AI / LLMs reproduce this? The market (bubble) thinks they will - I'm not as optimistic as the market, but I do believe they are fullfilling the promise of a significant advancement in "machine intelligence" that has been "5 years away" since 1980.
No. Literally from Wikipedia: "Third-party software support grew extremely quickly, and within a year the PC platform was supplied with a vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose."
Not a million chatbots with flaky guardrails and dubious value, getting pushed on random people. The value of a PC program was explicit and understandable.
... Because the PC Compatible emerged? Yeah I know. That's evidence of success.
Moving goalposts to a different metaphor (the dot-com bubble) makes me think you realized your first attempt at a metaphor sucked
Who wrote your Wikipedia article, and what's their source on the uptake of this vast array of titles by actual human beings with PCs supplied to them?
In 1985 I visited a rather highly ranked Nurse in a hospital saddled with one of those new miracle boat-anchors and despite the vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose, her management had supplied her with nada, zip, zilch, the bare OS with no specialty software and no peripherals like a printer. I showed her how to use the - very user UNfriendly - edlin program to be able to type text in and save it, and retrieve it later. That was a huge breakthrough for her since the thing had literally been a chunk of wasted space on her desk capable of absolutely no demonstrable utility for months, despite her asking for help from her management in using it.
Her story was not unique - that Billion $+ surge of successful sales was not driven by people clamoring for things they could use, it was driven by management wanting to get a jump on "the next big thing" - pushing their employees in the deep end with no clue how to swim and no instruction. Uptake took a lot of time, more in some areas than others, but the early 80s in particular had a lot of unused hardware sitting around doing nothing of value.
To a small minority of the population - not just the population in general - the specific population with PC access also.
And imagining a past that didn't happen is all too easy if you only read company approved histories.
The Wikipedia article is yours to peruse and fix if you think it's wrong. It has examples. I just quoted something that was particularly funny given your insistence that AI is literally the PC and clones.
Not my game, I have better things to do with my time and life than fight with a bunch of people editing articles that clearly conflict with the history I lived, for their own reasons.
40 years from now, AI, ML, LLMs and whatever comes after, are going to have significant roles in society - probably very different than they're being hyped for right now.
Leaping at new technology, pouring tons of money into it, and getting little in return at first is nothing new for businesses.
FIFY
It's slavery but with AI. (Silicon Valley execs foaming at the mouth from excitement)
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.
Hey you know what I could use to buy compute or literally anything else
The concept of acting like a human being is for the peasants to worry about.
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.
They are going full panic mode now. The crash has already begun.
Trump bombed the bubble.
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?
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.
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.
There was a brief, coincidental alignment of silicon valley's goals and human progress.
well put
When was this
Awesome! Now they can lose money and get wrong answers at the same time!
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.
Don't pay people enough money, expect them to buy your products with their non existent money.
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.
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?
Well, this is a fresh kind of hell...
Like all their ideas this one is also recycled.
The only thing they do that isn't increasing pollution
It’s like a grift card, only redeemable by the employer with your time, without the card.
and later
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 most IT jobs in the USA (beyond the junior level). Even in my MCOL area $125k-$200k is more common.
I really, really would like to see what tasks he is automating.
You can look on n8n what is successfull. It give some idea
Oh my god Iran. Just send the drones already
Salary is 64GB of virtual ram
Hey. AI. Go to the store and buy me food.
Hmmm. Doesn’t work.
Can't they just pay me in NFTs?
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..
..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..
What a bunch of fucking idiots.
Getting high on their own supply again I see.
16 tons and what do you get?
But that's just crypto again, isn't it? They tried the same bullshit.
This is a bit like a job listing for a trade or technician position advertising they will supply a vehicle.
No shit, I need a van to do my job. You don't really have a choice.
The chief marketing officer for AI, Bill Ofgoods, thinks this is a great idea and the CFO, Peg Inapoke, agrees. Brooklyn Bridge was unavailable for comment
This reminds me of workers being paid in vodka during the USSR era. 😬
I wonder if it's a coincidence.
A new variation of "Eat your own dog food" 😃
😊😁😂🤣
lol inference is already cheap af. Might as well pay money. Dipshits.
Per-token costs are down, but you need more tokens; overall costs are up.
Yeah they are trying to add more and more context and allow bigger and bigger requests.
Cost per request is probably still going up. On top of there being more and more requests.
You are probably right. This is basically what capitalism dictates. But considering API usage at least the context is in the developers control. Vibe coding is becoming pretty hungry though :D
Can we link an article that isn’t behind a paywall?
Certainly not. This one seems to be the source article. And you know the problem with those archive paywall busting side. They are doing a DDOS on other sites and are serving malware. So I won't link them. The article in question doesn't have a paywall for me, so maybe clean your cookies and cache or install some paywall busting plugins. Some paywalls are also time based, so they start after a certain amount of days, after a certain amount of visits, and are therefore hard to predict. So no there's no way to link another article.
Can you use archive.ph
May as well just pay the bots directly then....
Yeah, good luck with that.
Look at you. You are the cloud now.
And like RSUs, they're gonna stagger them over several years so you can't get the full value when they fire you mid way, not that there's any value in computes for actual real-life use. lol
Company that sells random collections of words: People are increasingly asking for random collections of words instead of money!
;-)
"Random bullshit Go!" meme..
They've finally proven that ALL they care-about is preventing integrity from having any root in any economy they're infesting, & that ANYTHING that displaces correct-view is worth pushing, to prevent correct-view.
That changes the framing, in my eyes:
That means that it isn't what they're pushing that is The Problem: they're simply too machiavellian to bother negotiating with.
THEY are the problem.
I'd want private-investigators on them, & I'd want a good war-chest for prosecuting them, once their corruption's evidence was unearthed, enough.
People THAT anti-integrity consistently create evidence of their corruption.
The state won't prosecute them ( big herds ONLY respect big herds, & corporations are herds, which is why when accountability threatens, they simply "dissipate", and .. "nobody is responsible!" .. same as herds ), so activist-groups are going to have to do it.
Totally different framing.
_ /\ _
Mate, I don’t want to be mean or give unsolicited advice, but I do want to help.
Your comment is well meant and I kind of get what you want to say, but it’s so hard to follow. It shows signs of incoherence and hyperassociativity. You’ve also written hundreds of lines of comments in the past few hours and they are all in a similar style. This might just be your style, but it is often a sign of schizophrenia, psychosis or mania.
I really hope you will talk to a doctor about this, or at least a family member or friend that you can confide in.
Thanks, but the medical-gaslighting my life was subjected to, is done.
Absolute-healing or death, not their gaslighting "help".
I find it nearly-impossible to translate complex thoughtshapes into linear-English, & there is no language for expressing thoughshapes themselves.
Also, having survived literal brain-decimation ( 1970's-1980's, epigenetic-disorder ) force-fighting my remaining-brain to work is also exhausting.
I'd rather evolve & die-alone than compromise my life the way your desired "help" of me, would molest my life again.
You probably don't have the decades of experience with being as-forced-as-possible to just drug myself into being an acceptable psychiatric-zombie,
instead of forcing my brain to improve.
I spent literally years much-of-the-time-catatonic with brain-injury, & they wanted me warehoused & on-drugs for the rest of my life.
Fuck that shit.
Feel free to terminate my life, if my life, itself, its-own-way, offends you, though..
Not that I expect you, whom I'm replying-to, would,
but all the people who find "me"/my-life unacceptable/intolerable ..
.. honest breaking my life, instead of trying to enforce drugged "living", being animate-but-not-ALIVE..
..would be more authentic, more honest.
& if anybody ever does smash my life to smithereens, no matter what reason they had for doing it, I don't want them prosecuted for ANYthing.
Because it'd be honest.
& honesty is something that this-world has nearly-none of.
Doctors doing all they can to enforce drugged-zombie condition on a life because brain-healing "isn't real: belief in brain-healing is itself mental-illness!"
Go read Dr. Norman Doidge's books, & see that brain-healing's real.
Better to die clean, than to "live", drugged, for the "mental illness" of having a literally-decimated brain.
Brain-injury is brain-injury, not "illness-of-mind".
So, while you mean well,
I'd rather you axe-murder my-life, than drug me the way they drugged me, because honest condition is better, for me.
Cheers.
_ /\ _
If this is what makes you happy, be my guest. But I can’t imagine that where you are now is a good place: living with thoughts that are incomprehensible and impossible to put into words, not to mention the hate, fear and paranoia.
There are more medications than the ones that make you feel like a zombie and there are better doctors out there who provide helpful cognitive behaviourial therapy instead of just pills.
they are already using AI to screen out applicants, im t surprised they dint do it in the first place.