cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/7579135
I owe my SOUL․md to the company store
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpoCzQ-va94&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260312-ai-companies-try-to-pay-staff-in-ai-tokens-not-money - podcasttime: 6 min 57 sec
No one ever pays me in gum :/
That gum you like is going to come back in style.
The new company scrip.
Still illegal.
yet far more useless than company scrip
The US is feudal now. There are no laws except the whim of the owning class.
At least you could buy food with company scrip.
Seems like they just have excess capacity and need some way to use it
They’re trying to reinvent company scrip? In the United States, payment in scrip became illegal in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
When society finally crumbles and the people storm the white house I have dibs on that gold wall sconce from home depot. The one on the left side, in that room where the lamp is, by the end table.
Funny idea, but never going to happen, not legal.
Yet.
A plot point in Terry Pratchett’s book Going Postal was postage stamps being used as currency, because they were backed by the postal system, which was seen as trustworthy.
This is a similar line of thinking, but far more delusional, as an AI company is nowhere near as trusted as the postal service.
US Forever stamps are inflation-proof, too.
AI tokens, I’m not so sure.
Except these stamps can’t even be handed over to someone else so you can’t even pay for anything with them. So the delusion is that you’re going to want to spend a significant part of your income on LM tokens no matter what.
You load 16 gigs, and what do you get? Sudo apt update && apt upgrade, Admin dont you call on me, cause I can’t compute, I owe my soul to the LLM.
Omg this needs to be turned into a proper cover/parody of the original song. Would be amazing and popular i am sure.
💯
What’s is that good for?
Owing your soul to the company store?
??? That’s not how getting paid works???
Can’t pay 'em if you got no revenue
The Business Insider article this article references makes a big stretch to try to frame it as compensation:
In other words, access to AI may soon matter as much as access to a fat salary and juicy equity awards. 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.
But what they’re talking about is pretty clearly a business expense and not payment, because it’s something they only get to use at work in order to do their job.
That’s stupid. That’s like saying “instead of paying you a livable wage, here’s some pants! I mean you need to wear pants for work right? You can use them at home too!”
Mf really out here thinking we use AI let alone wear pants in our own dang home. We want to cold hard cash! 💶💶💶!!! Lol
Pretty much literally what company stores used to do/what they want to do again. Except pants were an actual, useful, tangible thing.
I don’t think they are even going to allow them to use these credits at home honestly, the whole idea is just that being able to claim that a previous job gave you $X in AI credits is valuable for a resume and and so counts as compensation. They aren’t even talking about AI companies themselves doing this, it’s speculation about other companies spending 100k a year per worker on AI and why that would be worth it. Kind of what you would expect from an article that is mostly about things people said on LinkedIn I guess.
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.
Aren’t these candidates asking about token budgets for doing their job? This has nothing to do with compensation…
They likely don’t know their staff have lives outside of the company and assume they are on board with everything as they are a family.
They’re bringing
sexyscrip backThis has always been the goal
Because AI companies are running out of money?
call me back when my landlord decides AI tokens are acceptable for rent
Odd you would say that, guess what the company’s new venture is?
They also need to be accepted for groceries and drugs.
If only WorldCom had thought of paying employees in long distance minutes (they got for free at work), they’d still be around today, under theory that employees would still have worked there.
