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Jensen compared today’s AI tools to machinery that was invented during the industrial revolution
They really want this to be an apt comparison and it's really not
Edit
It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn’t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use.
They also really want to talk about tokens like they're some kind of currency
It's worse, they want to change the global economy to corporations paying corporations...
The total elimation of actual consumers, because none of us will be able to afford to consume enough.
AI companies need people to pay for AI to keep buying Nvidia chips. So Nvidia is making their employees pay for the AI so AI companies keep buying Nvidia chips.
It's not a sustainable system, it's just a money churn whose only purpose is to consolidate wealth.
So ponzi scheme?
I didn't read it that way. I think he's saying "bosses: if you're paying a $100k salary to a dev and not also paying $50k for tokens, your dev isn't working hard enough". Which is better, but only just.
To refine that even further, he doesn't appear to imply that the dev isn't WORKING hard enough, only that they're not being OPTIMALLY PRODUCTIVE.
What he's trying to do, really is float and normalize the concept of baking tokens into HR math in terms of a "golden ratio"... which happens to be 2:1.
So, when a company goes all in on ai, and they cut thier workforce in half, they'll need to add in 50% for tokens. 50% of the original staff, at a new 150% cost, puts the company at 75% pre ai workforce cost. This is the "guidelines" they're trying to normalize.
He didn't explicitly say it, but the language in use gels with the ones that have
They also really want to talk about tokens like they’re some kind of currency
i think it is better than pizza fridays for them, because they probably can't barter pizza for free.
This man went from high to low REAL fast.
The secret is he's always been low, nvidia has intermittently pulled tons of shady shit basically ever since the 3dfx days
The billionaire's way
Idk when he was every regarded highly by Nvidia users/consumers. Only by corporate board and investors
Huang wants employees to pay half of their salary back to the company ? There is no escaping the company store, eh ?
And CAD designers didn't have to pay half of their salary to use the CAD tools the company wanted them to use. How did that guy get to be in charge ?
You code 16 lines, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can′t go
I owe my soul to the company store
I didn't read it that way. I think he's saying "bosses: if you're paying a $100k salary to a dev and not also paying $50k for tokens, your dev isn't working hard enough".
Which is still utterly absurd, because it implies that a harder working dev would be spending more time chatting to a bot.
oh absolutely, but generating tokens is how nvidia gets paid, and companies are terrified of being left behind if they're not 100% onboard with LLM workflows
Your didn't read the article did you?
Jenson gives then free tokens just in case you don't want to read.
It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn’t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use
AFAIK, Nvidia employees aren’t paying for the tokens they use out of their own pockets, although it’s certainly beneficial to Nvidia in multiple ways if their own employees are making heavy use of AI.
Something I don't understand - AI coding is mostly useful in common code, snippets, easy stuff. What Nvidia is doing (drivers, optimization, chip design, etc.) is something I imagine there is close to zero AI training, so what can they realistically even use it for so much?
I’m gonna take a guess that a big portion of it is infrastructure-as-code, the operations side and not product development itself. I work in the operations side of things and we never touch the product at all, but we deal with a lot of code due to how backend infrastructure is built and maintained now, especially if you're in the cloud.
so what can they realistically even use it for so much?
Burn money on AI tokens so it looks like AI could be profitable some day so people keep investing in AI companies that can then buy Nvidia chips...
You're thinking of it like "how can AI make a better product"
They're looking at it as "how can we sell more chips"
Two very different questions with very different answers.
It's a house of cards and Nvidia can't afford to acknowledge no one wants AI or knows how to make it profitable.
Guess code review and troubleshooting. Not really sure, I have only really used it for code templates and ideas for troubleshooting to look into.
The most use I found is rewriting documents in a specific way. But only after I write it first. Then go back and forth. Just to make tone consistent.
There's plenty of driver code available. All of Linux and BSD, plus whatever internal stuff they have. Optimization is pretty generic.
Chip design maybe not, but I imagine you can train an AI on the principles and generate a bunch of candidates, then benchmark them in simulation.
"Dear AI coding agent, write for me a 10,000 page manifesto on the downsides of assigning performance metrics to employees unrelated to their actual work product. Populate it with generated images of Nvidia's CEO getting railed by a bunch of copyright lawyers in the style of a Studio Ghibli film. Please ensure every fifth sentence rhymes with orange. Continue to generate images and short videos of Jensen Huang licking shit off the floor of a 7-11 rest stop bathroom until you have used enough tokens to meet my salary target."
Oh this will be a fun. "Please spend more of our company money, or else we will think you are not doing your job"
it's so fucking easy to send bogus requests that use tons of processing time. This is the DUMBEST metric i've seen in a long, long time. If an employee of theirs uses 500k worth of processing time now, are they better employees? What if someone manages to spend 10 million worth of tokens? 100 million? Performance metrics should be outcome based instead of "how much money did you spend" lol
Kinda similar to musks LOC requirement. But at least with NVIDIA this idea directly correlates with more business if it spreads beyond the company
It's not a metric it's a marketing stunt.
I'd be amazed if they internally do not have objectives to implement the kool aid.
But yeah, of course it's propaganda. If this bite lands in the right ear of an exec, they can implement this as a metric in their review process.
This is even dumber than tracking how many lines of code each dev commits.
you first, mr huang
If these AI engineers were fully committed to AI, then they would be happy to be paid in tokens. The fact that they still demand to be paid in human money proves that they are just philistines and sycophants.
I want him to explain where the half salary number comes from, specifically and in detail backed up with analysis from real life data. Also I will still bust out paper and pen for graphs, layouts and design ideas because that's how I figure out what works and what really doesn't work before I waste a bunch of time with a PC. Incidentally I use zero AI in my job, no matter how much they want us to.
I mean... if you take into account fair price of utilities (water and electric) and skyrocketing costs of RAM... I don't fully disagree.
Ballparking, but 50% of an engineer's job being "boilerplate" and "charlie work" sounds reasonable to me. Maybe even 75%. That IS what generative AI is really good at. It is the kind of work that you can have a particularly ambitious student intern do.
What makes a good engineer is the ability to verify that work. In software this is "code review". And the other aspect is actual innovation. Solving particularly complex problems or breaking a problem down into manageable and verifiable tasks.
And... guess how you maintain your skills to be able to do that? That's right. Charlie Work.
Which is the problem. Managers (and wannabe managers) just see short term gains. So they want EVERYTHING to be done with "AI" because they want to bulk fire people and reduce operating costs. And they don't at all care that they are causing a massive brain drain because that is next quarter's problem.
But yeah. Use generative AI to accelerate your workflow. But also understand when it is very much worth taking your time. Either to keep those skills fresh or just because you can do it in a "fun" way. And if you feel that ALL of your workload can be done by chatgpt... maybe think about how much cheaper a claude subscription is compared to your salary and benefits.
Tech people are all circle jerking dipshits
