{"id":560241,"date":"2026-03-24T02:54:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T02:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/560241\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T02:54:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T02:54:15","slug":"jensen-huang-says-nvidia-engineers-should-use-ai-tokens-worth-half-their-annual-salary-every-year-to-be-fully-productive-compares-not-using-ai-to-using-paper-and-pencil-for-designing-chips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/560241\/","title":{"rendered":"Jensen Huang says Nvidia engineers should use AI tokens worth half their annual salary every year to be fully productive \u2014 compares not using AI to using paper and pencil for designing chips"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he\u2019ll be deeply alarmed if an engineer getting paid $500,000 a year does not consume at $250,000 worth of AI tokens to get their job done. The leather-clad chief of the world\u2019s most valuable AI company said this during an episode of the All-In Podcast<\/a> shot on the last day of Nvidia GTC 2026, after one of the hosts asked Huang if he\u2019s spending around $2 billion a year on tokens for the Nvidia engineering team, with Jensen answering, \u201cWe\u2019re trying to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jensen Huang: Nvidia’s Future, Physical AI, Rise of the Agent, Inference Explosion, AI PR Crisis – YouTube
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\u201cLet me give you a thought experiment. Let\u2019s say you have a software engineer or AI researcher, and you pay them $500,000 a year,\u201d the Nvidia CEO said. He also added, \u201cAt the end of the year, I\u2019m going to ask him how much did you spend in tokens. And [if] that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else. If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.\u201d Huang went on to compare an employee not using AI tokens to a chip designer saying that they will use paper and pencil and eschew CAD tools to get their work done.<\/p>\n

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Jensen compared today\u2019s AI tools to machinery that was invented during the industrial revolution, which allowed workers to physically do things that, in the past, were either too heavy, too big, or took too long. Now, it seems that the Nvidia CEO wants to use AI for mental tasks so that Nvidia engineers can focus on creativity. \u201cIt\u2019s just a new way of doing computer programming. In the past, we code. In the future, we\u2019re going to write ideas, architectures, specifications,\u201d Huang said. \u201cI think that every engineer is going to have a hundred agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn\u2019t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use. According to Business Insider<\/a>, many tech companies are now starting to offer guaranteed access to AI inference power as part of the remuneration package to candidates. That thought is that by giving people generous amounts of AI tokens, they\u2019d be able to amplify their productivity by as much as 10 times or more.<\/p>\n

However, using AI in the corporate setting is not without its issues. There have been reports that more than half of CEOs have yet to see clear benefits from AI deployments<\/a>, with only about 12% getting higher revenues and reduces costs. We\u2019ve also seen several AI-related outages with Amazon Web Services<\/a>, with one report saying that Amazon has called its engineers for a meeting<\/a> to discuss issues created by \u201cGen-AI assisted changes\u201d that had \u201chigh blast radius.\u201d And although Microsoft<\/a> did not say anything about AI, it promised to fix Windows 11\u2019s most annoying flaws<\/a> to restore its reputation several months after its CEO revealed that AI writes up to 30% of Microsoft\u2019s code<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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