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Silicon Valley Is Buzzing About This New Idea: AI Compute As Compensation 86

Posted by BeauHD from the new-component-of-tech-salaries dept.
sziring shares a report from Business Insider: Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference. As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models -- known as inference -- is emerging as a productivity driver and a budget line that finance chiefs can't ignore.

Software engineers and AI researchers inside tech companies have already been jousting for access to GPUs, with this AI compute capacity being carefully parceled out based on which projects are most important. 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. He added that usage per user is growing much faster than overall user growth, a sign that AI compute is becoming even scarcer and more valuable. That scarcity is reshaping how engineers think about their work and pay. "The inference compute available to you is increasingly going to drive overall software productivity," said OpenAI President Greg Brockman.

The report cites a recent compensation submission from a software engineer that listed "Copilot subscription" as part of the pay and benefits. "OpenAI and Anthropic should create recruitment sites where their clients can advertise roles, listing the token budget for the job alongside the salary range," said Peter Gostev, AI capability lead at Arena, a startup that measures the performance of models.

Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures predicts AI inference will be the fourth component of engineering compensation, alongside salary, bonus, and equity. "Will you be paid in tokens? In 2026, you likely will start to be," Tunguz said.

Silicon Valley Is Buzzing About This New Idea: AI Compute As Compensation More | Reply

Silicon Valley Is Buzzing About This New Idea: AI Compute As Compensation

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  • Yeah, fuck you too, where's life balance?

  • Not compensation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChrisKnight ( 16039 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:12PM (#66034114) Homepage

    This isn't compensation, if it is something necessary to do the job at the levels they require, any more than asking if the building has HVAC in the summer is negotiating benefits.

    They sell the idea that using AI is necessary for the position, and then try to sell access to that AI as a perk? That's rich up there with working in a coal mine and being told you can only use company tools, and that for some positions they supply the tools and some they don't.

    • Re:Not compensation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:19PM (#66034132)

      No kidding, how is this any different than saying "The laptop we provide to you, which is required to do your work, is considered part of your compensation. But no, you don't get to take it with you when you leave."

    • Re:Not compensation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:22PM (#66034142)

      Yep. Essentially a scam. Tools for the job are to be provided by the employer, no matter how expensive. And they can get very expensive.

      I guess they can get a few true AI believers cheaper that way. But do you really want to hire such people?

      • "Tools for the job are to be provided by the employer, no matter how expensive. And they can get very expensive."

        That's often not true. Many professions expect a workman to have his own tools. Auto mechanics, carpenters, musicians, electricians, plumbers, photographers, and so on.

        • They said employer. Of course self-employed people are expected to use their own tools, as they are their own employer.
          • Many ... if not most ... mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and other employees in the trade industries are expected to provide their own tools. Some garages do provide them ... mostly chain operations ... but small and medium sized businesses regularly expect the employee to own their own tools.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Idzy ( 1549809 )
          only because some tradesmen wanted better tools then they were provided and brought their own ruining it for the rest. Now its expected and should not be sad state of affairs. I do the job with the tools they provide and they get the best I can do with what they provide anything else is insane

    • It also betrays that the raw cost of AI outstrips any efficiency gains.

      OpenAI needs to pay someone less for it to be worth using their product. One would think if the gains outstripped the cost they'd pay someone more, or at least let them use the tool with equal pay.

      • It also betrays that the raw cost of AI outstrips any efficiency gains.

        I don't think so.

        There are more and less efficient ways of using AI. Using it more efficiently takes more work, more planning, more thinking, but the cost difference can be pretty enormous, so companies have a motivation to put budgets in place to motivate engineers to be more efficient.

        For example, for many tasks, the slightly older and cheaper models are sufficient (e.g. Claude Sonnet 4.5 - medium effort), but for other things you really want the better reasoning of a later model with more context (e

    • This isn't compensation, if it is something necessary to do the job at the levels they require, any more than asking if the building has HVAC in the summer is negotiating benefits.

      They sell the idea that using AI is necessary for the position, and then try to sell access to that AI as a perk? That's rich up there with working in a coal mine and being told you can only use company tools, and that for some positions they supply the tools and some they don't.

      The "as compensation" model is clearly ludicrous. I see it as a valid "work environment" question, though, up there with free food, etc. All else equal (which it never is) I'd much rather work at the place that gives me a $500 monthly budget over the place with a $200 budget.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      Honestly, this looks like a slip up. We know that AI is not being charged what it costs and eventually they will have to. This seems like an oops we let them know that AI is expensive and we will eventually have to pay for it.

    • My company gives me 300 Github Copilot premium model credits per month. When I'm out, I'm out. It would be in their best interest to give me as much as I can possibly use. It's like $0.04 per request. But nope. Instead I'm back to writing code manually, or trying to debug the drivel that the free models regurgitate.

      Seriously, if I was interviewing today, how much compute I get is a question I would most certainly ask!

    • Only idiots think that AI can be creative. It can help free you to be more creative... but I suspect that is not how AI is being pushed or used in those jobs.

    • > The report cites a recent compensation submission from a software engineer that listed "Copilot subscription" as part of the pay and benefits.

      That sounds more like a punishment than any sort of perk or compensation. I wonder what the engineer in question did to suffer such crappy AI?

    • For exceeding expectations we are giving you a 100 toilet flush bonus.

    • Next up: The slaves return, and those without access to them perish.

      Brought to you by your corpo masters. They never gave up on the ideal of slavery.

  • you get 16 tons (Score:5, Funny)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:25PM (#66034150)

    of Co2

  • Good grief. Giving them ideas. (Score:3)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:26PM (#66034152)

    If the techbros think they can get by with "compensating" people by giving them compute to do the job.... I got nothing. Even worse, people are ASKING for that as part of their compensation package? That'd be like a person in 1995 saying part of their take-home would be a desktop computer at their desk to do their coding on. This just seems like a weird reflection of the "AI GOD IS COMING, YOU MUST BE A PART OF AI GOD" mentality that's pervading all of tech.

    I'm more than a little skeeved out by it being framed as compensation.

    • This all sounds like desperate BS to me. The AI bros looking for ideas to implement hoping to make more use of their slop machines. I highly doubt people are asking for AI as compensation.

      • I have no doubt that applicants are asking about what tools are used and will be available.

        But the only people looking at these tools as part of the compensation package are the executive team members. I don't even think middle managers would be stupid enough to look at this as part of the applicant's compensation.

      • I have an idea: pay me cash as compensation. If I want to, I can use the cash to buy AI time.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          spoiler: i won't use the cash to buy AI time.. or "compute" as they say.... yuck.

    • Especially when 'tokens' are a consumable and sessions are typically auditable.

      There likely have been cases, back when PCs and workstations were expensive and endpoint auditing and management were typically fairly light, when computers were used to sweeten the deal at least for certain sorts of lower level nerds; but because it was fairly easy to just turn a blind eye to recreational use off hours and relatively difficult to have random endpoint hardware doing something productive 24/7.

      With 'cloud' re

  • How about charging everyone the true cost first? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @06:24PM (#66034266) Homepage
    By now everyone should be paying the real cost of running their little AI project - including energy use, build-out cost, and R&D cost. Let people see just how much their little 'AI do my homework' query actually costs the world.

  • Global mergers/acquisitions heading toward all technology being the proprietary possession of a small coterie of Barons.
    You will be technically "free" to live as you wish, the same way the poor schmucks who took the Red Pill exited the Matrix and were free-- to scrabble out their depressing MRE-hardtack existence hiding in the dark crags of subterranean tunnels.

    You will, on paper, philosophically speaking, have all your freedoms, but they won't be worth exercising. Because if you want access to the producti

  • The AI inference scam is going to come to an end. Thanks to smaller and smarter reasoning models, one does not need to buy most inference subscriptions nor pay for tokens anymore. That whole industry is going rekt soon.
    • Not as long as the SOTA models retain a significant advantage over the open models- people will keep paying for them.
      And they do, and every time it looks like they might eventually fall behind, they leap forward.

      The real question isn't about the inference- it's when do the SOTA models hit the wall of what it costs to train them. That's the magic that the bubble is fueling. Inference is a legitimate commodity. People paid for compute before AI, and they will after AI. But nobody at the front of the pack h

  • Compete for resources ... (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @06:43PM (#66034304)

    ... you'll need to do your job. Sounds like a place I'd love to work.

    One out of two gets rifle.
    The one without, follows him!
    When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots!

    - Enemy at the Gates

  • Ah! I missed that at first... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @06:48PM (#66034306)

    This is from TFA, and should have been in TFS:

    As a coder in the AI era, if you don't have access to massive compute, you might end up producing far less software than your colleagues, threatening your career prospects.

    When I read that, I couldn't help thinking that software development will move farther and faster toward every project being its own gig. Any company benefits beyond those making an employee more effective will be sacrificed by said employee in the pursuit of more dollars and a better resume to help land more - and more lucrative - gigs in the future.

    I didn't use the word 'gig' carelessly. I predict that if what TFA is talking about ever gains real traction, it will turn the whole industry into the high end of the gig economy. A much larger portion of corporate programming departments will consist of temps working for large paycheques and minimal benefits.

    Coincidentally - or maybe not - this dovetails nicely with the advent of "vibe coding". Everything written will be the programming equivalent of dollar store goods: it will be cheap, it will work (perhaps only for some values of "work"), and nobody will miss it when it falls apart because it was meant to fill a short-term need and by then it will be "on to the next".

    Everybody expects dollar store goods to work, but nobody expects quality or durability from them. This may be the advent of dollar store programming as an everyday industry-wide practice.

    • Pretty solid pondering.
      I'm inclined to agree as someone pretty deeply embedded in the bullshit currently, 20 years into my career as a software engineer.
      Though only thing I'm not so sure about is the large paycheques part.
      Mostly, we've been looking at this semi-sentient codegen operators as disposable, and paying them disposable wages.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MikeS2k ( 589190 )

        People round the world; in the workplace and more in their homes, will just be expected to use buggy software prone to crashing and messing up data; it will just be an accepted thing. The days of well made, easy to use, robust software will disappear. I wonder if we'll start seeing more things return to pen and paper as a result?

        • If that does happen, then yes. Anything where accuracy or accountability is required (legally) will switch back to pen and paper. At least until the software houses get their acts back together, some government mandate happens, or the more likely outcome, the companies will just get buggy software declared a negative externality to be paid by the taxpayers without compensation.
        • Sadly, I think we are almost there already of the "mostly works most of the time" software across most domains. We got there without AI, but instead with cheap contract shops copying and pasting code in bulk, gluing together large code projects, bloating the software beyond belief with a myriad of dependencies. AI reaching human competency level does not necessarily require AI to get better, it can also be accomplished by reducing human competency, which the software industry has been doing for while now.

    • A much larger portion of corporate programming departments will consist of temps working for large paycheques and minimal benefits.

      I believe the ideal is to have EVERYONE, not merely programmers, be temps without benefits.

      It is nice to have slaves without being responsible for caring for the health and well being of those slaves.

  • Nobody is asking this lol gtfo

  • A decently proficient software developer can get an awful lot done with AI assistance these days. Far more than anyone would be capable of on their own. AI can be an incredible productivity booster in the hands of a practiced user, and in my opinion those practitioners are way more valuable as employees than the folks who won't use AI.

    But the AI rocket fuel does cost money. A good coding practitioner who is able to flog the AI unmercifully can burn through a lot of credits. I'm seeing reports of $2-3k per m

  • by the end of this century, hiring is going to look like a fad of the previous one.

  • If it is in fact compensation, then the employee owns said compensation once received. As with paycheck, or stock grants, they can sell it, trade it, use it for whatever they want to. It doesn't sound like this article talks about compensation. AI tokens sounds more like work accommodations, like a chair to sit in, desk, or electricity to light the workspace and power the computer - none of which the employee is allowed to resell (sell the cube furniture for extra money, or install a crypto rig to run off o
    • No, services, for example can be a compensation, and no you do not own them.
      What's important to remember, is that you are taxed at the fair market value of the compensation- regardless of whether you own it.
      • What would be some examples of such services provided as compensation, which are not owned/controlled by the employee but taxable as compensation?
        • Childcare is the one that comes to mind, but really anything with enough value that doesn't have an explicit exemption will be treated as taxable income on its value.
          • Is parking at work considered taxable compensation (it has value, especially in big cities)? How is a place to park your kid safely different than a place to park your car in the eyes of the IRS or other tax authorities?
            • You can read all about it IRS publication p15b [irs.gov].

              But I think you don't actually care enough to read it. I think you'd rather remain ignorant.
            • From a logical perspective, I agree with you.
              From a legal perspective- the rules are way too fucking complicated for me.
              I trust our accounting department to tell me what's taxable and what isn't (since they have to account for them too)

  • Anything you can't take with is not "compensation" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thesandbender ( 911391 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @08:52PM (#66034462)
    Dear young turks:

    If you can't take it with you when you decide to walk out the door (or the company shows it to you), it is not compensation. Period, end of story.
    - Stock options: do you actually have the stocks yet?
    - Bonuses: do you actually have the bonus yet?
    - Fancy coffee machines and free lunches: nope
    Insist on money so that you can decide what to do with it.

    A note on stock option. Besides the fact that stock options often don't pan out, investing in the industry you work in (much less the company you work for) is generally a bad idea. If the industry is in a down cycle and you get laid off, your options are probably worthless at that point as well. The value of your options is not tied to your effort but the decisions of PHB a few floors up.

    Sincerely,
    The Grey Beard
  • Yes they should pay you to use the tools they're forcing you to. But their trillion dollar bet is that you're training the tool to do your job for you. So I'd rather bank a cheque than have a discount called a perk. And anybody who's working in tech now and not saving up (while investing in ???) isn't thinking ahead

  • If you offer me subscriptions to AI platforms as compensation I am walking out the door.

  • Energy credits to run your compute or your coffee maker? This future of currency has been predicted by sci-fi authors for longer than I've been alive. I think it's probably going to happen one day, but it is also not terribly insightful to point out.

  • And pay for unreasonable housing costs and food using AI credits. But why stop there, why not pay them in Nixon bucks and make them buy everything from the company store?

  • This is so clearly some astroturfing from the hollow suits&ties to plant the idea they could count something as pseudo-compensation they can provide for nearly free while increasing the usage count of their more-or-less-random BS-generators - and then they can hassle their subordinates why they are not more productive, forcing ever more unpaid overtime.

  • What (!?!!!), on top of those 50B AI tokens, you'll also provide a keyboard, a screen and a MOUSE? Is there any end to your generosity? Where do I sign? Who cares about trivia like the $5 p/a paycheck, no health benefits and no equity.
  • If this is a type of "compensation" that's listed on a pay stub, then employees will pay tax on the value of the "benefit". This is a corporate expense, not an employee benefit. If I am expected to utilize a tool as part of work, then the employer better have a corporate account that I'm not pay tax on as a benefit. If the company doesn't have the resources to fully fund the tools I need as an employee, you can't afford me and I'm going somewhere else.

  • Or, can you buy stuff with it? If you leave the company, do you get to keep it?

    Calling it "compensation" is probably illegal, since it's considered a necessary to perform the job. Employers are required to provide employees with the tools needed to do their jobs.

    Thankfully, my company isn't trying this swindle, they provide professional GitHub Copilot licenses for all developers.

  • This reminded me of how societies started using PAMs as currency in the Bobiverse. Of course using a printer autofactory would typically produce something of value, unlike AI.

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