Jensen Huang floated AI tokens as part of engineers' compensation. Sam Altman says they could one day be a form of universal basic income.
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- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said companies need to be bestowing huge AI token budgets on their engineers.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an even grander plan for these basic components of large language models.
- Altman wants to generate enough AI tokens to power incomes worldwide.
AI and tech CEOs can't stop talking about tokens.
On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang elevated the conversation by proposing that tokens be part of an engineer's compensation package.
"It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens comes along with my job?" Huang said during his keynote speech at Nvidia's GTC 2026 in San Jose. "And the reason for that is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive."
Tokens are the language of AI. Large language models break down words and other inputs into numerical tokens to make them easier to process. Each token is roughly ¾ of a word. This has become the way AI model providers charge for their services, with pricing based on the number of tokens used and generated.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has gone even further than Huang. He has suggested that, in the future, AI tokens could enable a universal basic income by allowing citizens to choose whether to spend their slice of AI compute or sell it to others.
"I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets a slice of GPT-7's compute and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars but this like slice, you own part of the productivity," Altman said during a May 2024 episode of the All-In podcast.
In the same vein, Altman recently said that AI's output of raw intelligence will be akin to another utility like water or power.
"Fundamentally, our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said earlier this month during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C.
Altman's vision is predicated on a successful buildout of the massive AI data centers. Huang calls them "token factories."
It's why AI needs to start delivering on its promises, Microsoft Satya Nadella has warned.
"We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness, across all sectors, small and large," Nadella said in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Not everyone is having the same conversation about tokens.
That's especially because, as AI models advance, users are pushing them to do more and more complex tasks. Depending on the complexity of the work and the terms of an enterprise agreement, workers can quickly run up their companies' AI bills.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently complained that 8090, which he started with "the goal of replacing/rewriting all the legacy software in the world, was seeing its AI costs skyrocket, despite not seeing a similar jump in revenues.
"Our costs have more than tripled since November of 25," Palihapitiya said during an episode of the "All-In Podcast" posted on Friday. "Between the inference cost that we pay AWS, which is ginormous, between our cost with Cursor, between Anthropic, we are just spending millions."