The dizzying pace of change
Tesla told staff it will impose a $200-per-week limit on employee AI spending starting July 6, according to an internal memo reported by The Information (paywall).
The cap lands just months after Tesla pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, a sign that even companies betting their future on the technology are struggling to control its costs.
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Some teams even built internal dashboards that ranked employees by token consumption to encourage more usage. That encouragement worked a little too well: software engineers were often consuming “thousands of dollars’ worth of tokens each week,” according to two people familiar with the usage. Under the new policy, workers will need sign-off to spend above $200 per week.
Now, take a trip with me in my time machine to the far-distant past, alllll the way back to March 20, 2026:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday floated a novel compensation model that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary, effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as productivity multipliers.
Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” Huang said.
″[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay,” Huang said at the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference.
“I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.”
Well, the AI boosters have been right about one thing: it is hard to keep up with how fast this industry is changing!