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Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary

cnbc.com

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Re: Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary

#3

Post by piva00 »

Huang is absolutely losing the plot, salary is compensation for work done, for time spent away from other things in life, and to sustain your life outside of work.

Tokens as "compensation" falls into the not-even-wrong bucket, tokens are business expenses as input for work.

Edit: it's actually CNBC using deceptive language in the article, not Huang proposing paying people with tokens as brought up by OJFord [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47454487

Re: Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary

#4

Post by naravara »

Any time I see a pitch for companies paying people in things that aren’t money I think of the Simpsons bit where Homer finds $20 under the couch and is disappointed that it’s not a peanut.

There’s reasons why, because of what a company does, it’s able to offer you something for markedly cheaper than you’d get it on the market, so the arbitrage you can do by getting it at that discount may be worth it, like getting a free meal or drink when you work at a restaurant. But in most cases, money can be exchanged for goods and services and $1 of currency is always going to be more valuable than $1 worth of some commodity.

Re: Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary

#6

Post by CodingJeebus »

Reminds me of the pre-prohibition era where distilleries often paid their workers by giving them liquor (payment in kind) to manage liquidity issues.

This looks like a clever way to try to compete for talent without continuing to ratchet up pay, allowing Nvidia to continue to expand their debt without needing additional cash.

Re: Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary

#7

Post by greenpizza13 »

This is some bad reporting, IMO.

Here’s the quote

“ “I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.” “

It’s less of him saying it’s a bonus or a perk and more him saying expect to spend that much more on top of base salary to get enormous productivity boosts.

Now, I could see availability of these tools as an incentive to joining a place, which is no different than joining an engineering team because the use nice MacBooks.

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