Salary, Bonus, Equity… Tokens?

Your next job offer might just come with a "token budget" line item. The idea has been gaining steam in Silicon Valley. In February, a VC named Tomasz Tunguz dropped a blog post arguing that inference costs are becoming the fourth pillar of engineering compensation alongside salary, bonus, and equity. Here is the math: the 75th percentile software engineer in the US draws $375k. Add $100k in inference costs and you're at $475k. That's 21% in tokens.A month later, Jensen Huang took this up a notch. The Nvidia CEO said he'd be alarmed if a $500k engineer wasn't burning through at least $250k worth of tokens.What does this actually mean if you're running an AI startup today? As agents go mainstream and the competition heats up, how do you stay ahead? How is the token bill allotted and negotiated? Akash Anand, CEO of Clueso, a Y Combinator-backed startup turning raw screen recordings into polished product videos, joins Zero Shot to break down his real token math.Spoiler: more tokens does not simply equal more productivity.Tune in!___This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.____Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!____Additional ResourcesHow AI is making and remaking the products that we build More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens