Inference is the new 401k matching and what we’re learning from AI-related outages

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:05)
So Ben, did you hear that Meta acquired Moltbook?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:09)
Oh yeah, I heard it too many times at this point. It seems like everyone wants to talk about it. What's Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with monetizing personal relationships with AI? What's up with that? It just feels like this is another step in that journey. I don't know, what do you think?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:26)
I mean, what do you mean? It's the perfect thing to add to his repertoire. Another website for users pretending to be people. I think that it's another notch in his belt for sure. But actually, I think it's really interesting to think that it would be something that is hungry for an acquisition. Nothing in my mind really struck me as like, I want to buy a Moltbook.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:46)
Yeah. I'm like, what insane experiment can I create that some company will come along and buy?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:53)
Well, I do think there's an interesting telling there about maybe this being like a wink to where things are going and like the new consumer economy, because obviously you have these advertisers in their ad marketplace, making the bet that in the future they're going to be selling to your agents more than they're going to be selling to you. So you might as well start owning the places where those agents go. It could be a really interesting kind of transformation of the Internet, just depending on if it's artificial readers end up outnumbering its real ones.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:22)
It kind of makes me wonder what happens. Can you just make agents that create enough value on their own that they become an acquirable target? But yeah, I'm just reflecting on how chaotic this open claw has made the AI space. Its inventor went to open AI, now we have the social network that was spawned out of it, that's gone on to Meta. But then you also just have companies like Anthropic over here that are just like quietly building co-work, and it's like using all the same conventions, but that are letting smart people like you and me just solve our own problems with them, rather than having to get a product out of it or something.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:02)
It's also a difference in the organizations. Anthropic somewhere, I think they built co-work in what, like 10, 12 days or something. Meta Super Intelligence Lab, that's a place where a bunch of smart people and interesting ideas go never to be heard from again. So far, it's really just the Willy Wonka factory of AI. And so, I just don't know what this means even for Moltbook, but definitely something to watch.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:26)
Yeah. Well, anyways, welcome to the Friday Deploy. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:30)
And I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:32)
Here's this week's news. Getting paid in GPU time, a Playbook for harness engineering, a spate of outages including incidents tied to the use of AI tools, and are you falling behind if you're not running agents every minute of the hour? Andrew, let's just start right at the top of that and get to talk about these people who are getting paid in AI compute. What's the story?

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:55)
Yes, so OpenAI's Greg Brockman said inference compute is increasingly driving software productivity, but also becoming part of compensation packages. And one submission on the levels.FYI even listed a copilot subscription as a benefit. So it's really interesting to think that AI usage could represent upwards of even 20% of total engineering compensation based on some VC's estimates on this news.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (3:20)
Yeah, I think both of us can kind of relate to this. We've had discussions about how quickly just raw token cost can become one of our biggest budget needs. And it can just suddenly ramp up overnight once we find a new workflow that we're going to use.
I mean, the moment that I started doing agent orchestration, I immediately felt this anxiety around my token usage limits. I didn't really like being in this place where I had to temper my goals and expectations around what I thought I could fit into a five-hour token session. There was a number in here that I saw that there was an estimate that token cost could reach a level of 20% of an employee's salary. I think just looking at the horizon that exists today, if the trajectory continues, I could see that being a reality that you actually would be consuming so many tokens that it would be a significant portion of the cost of hiring someone. So yeah, I don't know. What do you think, Andrew, especially around this being a part of compensation packages?