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Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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AI companies who can't find anyone to buy their product, swear their employees would rather have their product in exchange for labor rather than money...
Which could easily be used to buy the product no one outside the company is buying.
This is just a way to juice metrics and claim this "compensation" as sales on the books.
And I'm almost positive the "per user growth" they're talking about is just how brain rot addicts will use chatbots for everything once their brain atrophies from not using it. But just by mentioning that they had to admit that overall use wasn't a metric they wanted to talk about.
It's like how a small percentage of drinkers (the alcoholics) buy the vast amount of alcohol. Less people drinking is bad for the company, and a few alcoholics can't sustain the company without being replaced by new addicts.
Edit:
Also, isn't this literally a plot point from Silicon Valley?
Like, their desperation move to get funding at some point was handing out compute tokens, but the only people who wanted to buy it was their competitors because non of the companies had customers?
Sort of. It was more of a crypto token and the competitor was buying them all up so they could control over 50% and effectively break Pied Piper's system.
It's been a minute, but I thought the tokens represented compute time
But then they realized people valued the idea of compute time more than the compute time.
So it became similar to crypto, where it was just used as a currency.
The part about gaining control I thought was something else, where Pied Piper didn't have 50% of accounts on an app, just a majority. And due to the decentralized nature of their software, whoever had the majority controlled the code. So the Chinese and Gavin set up a zombie network of bot phones to gain 50% in a hostile takeover once the boys were switched from independent accounts to an organization.
But like I said, it's been a minute and sometimes I'm wrong.
But I think they were two separate iterations of what the company was at the time