Ai Companies Try To Pay Staff In Ai Tokens, Not Money

This week’s big headline is: “Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation“. Uh huh. [Business Insider]

The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an AI company … you get paid in AI tokens. The units that the AI vendor charges API access in. You have to use these tokens in your job, too.

This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store. Company scrip was always just a scam, and paying workers in company scrip has been illegal in the US since 1938. But you know these guys don’t care.

Other companies would love to pay workers in AI tokens too! And not in, y’know, money.

Tech-illiterate CEOs and venture capitalists keep talking about AI tokens like they’re a commodity you can pile up. Even though tokens aren’t commensurable at all between different models.

The key point is that they love the idea of printing their own money. It’s the word “token.” They want AI tokens to be treated like crypto tokens. Something you can print out of thin air, then exchange like it’s money.

This idea was most recently floated by Thibault Sottiaux at OpenAI: [Twitter, archive]

I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex.

So firstly, I don’t believe anyone’s asking that. But OpenAI president Greg Brockman retweeted Sottiaux. So this idea is the OpenAI corporate line. [Twitter, archive]

AI bros have previously promoted Universal Basic Income once the AI singularity comes — and not a moment before. Even though we could do this tomorrow — the main barrier to a reasonable welfare system is whiny billionaires who hate being taxed. Specifically, these guys.

Remember that Sam Altman is still a crypto bro, with his proof-of-eyeballs magic bean Worldcoin. Altman’s been pushing the idea of a universal basic income — or universal basic compute — made of AI tokens for a few years now. This is Altman on the All-In Podcast in May 2024, talking to his fellow billionaires: [YouTube]

I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal basic income, and everybody gets a slice of GPT7’s compute and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars but this productivity slice, you own part of the productivity.

This wasn’t a one-off. Here’s Altman again last May, on the Theo Von podcast: [YouTube]

I mean a crazy idea, but in the spirit of crazy ideas is, if the world, there’s like eight roughly eight billion people in the world. If the world can generate eight quintillion tokens per year, if that’s the world, actually let’s say the world can generate 20 quintillion tokens per year. Tokens are like each word generated by an AI. Okay, just making up a huge number here. We’ll say 12 of those go to the normal capitalistic system, but eight of those eight quintillion tokens are going to get divided up equally among eight billion people. So everybody gets one trillion tokens and that’s your universal basic wealth globally.

Altman really likes the idea of made-up credit at OpenAI being the money now. Because he’s a crypto bro.

This token as money talk leaves me wondering if the investment in the AI companies is getting shaky. Nvidia’s just said this latest OpenAI investment round might be the last: [Reuters]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the latest investments in OpenAI and ​Anthropic might be the chipmaker’s last in those companies, ‌as the AI companies prepare to go public this year.

Nvidia is about to spend $26 billion building its own open weight AI model too. [Wired]

I’m also wondering if the AI vendors are running a bit low on actual cash dollars, and not just promises and letters of intent.

The good news is that even though these bozos are all sociopaths, AI is not so useful, and more tokens for the AI aren’t so useful either. Unless you’re a terminal vibe coder and probably working at an AI vendor.

I don’t think a lot of people will accept a Copilot allowance in place of actual money. I owe my SOUL.md to the company store.

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