There you have it! Jensen Huang just said the quiet part out loud: a $500K engineer should be bur…
June 23, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
AI Workforce
There you have it! Jensen Huang just said the quiet part out loud: a $500K engineer should be burning $250K a year in tokens.
He is not entirely wrong. But let me show you what that number actually unlocks once you stop thinking like a manager and start thinking like a builder.
I run a full news media company. UnbiasedHeadlines.com. Original reporting, written and published end to end, every day.
Here is what it costs me in tokens: about $200 a day.
Not $250,000 a year. Not per engineer. Two hundred dollars a day.
For that, 16 AI agents do the whole job. They watch the world 24/7. They research the story. They write the piece — our own original journalism, no spin, no agenda, no talking points handed down from an owner. They score it for newsworthiness, generate the audio so you can listen on the drive, and publish it. No human touches the keyboard.
A traditional newsroom needs dozens of people and millions of dollars to do a fraction of that — slower, and with a bias baked into every line.
So sit with the gap. The old model: $250k a year buys you TWO journalists. My model: $200 a day buys you a newsroom that never sleeps, never sells out, and ships 140 original stories every single day.
That is not a productivity tweak. That is a different physics.
And this is exactly what I wrote a whole book about. REPLACEMENT is not a prediction. It is a receipt. The work that used to require a building full of people now runs on a credit card and a handful of agents. I did not theorize it. I built it, and you are reading the output.
The uncomfortable part: this applies to your industry too. Whatever you think makes your headcount safe — the coordination, the judgment, the "you need a team for this" — is the next thing the agents absorb.
Huang is telling you to spend the $250k on tokens. I am telling you what happens to everyone who doesn't.
The question is no longer whether it happens. It is whether you are the one building the agents — or the line item they replace.
Go read UnbiasedHeadlines.com. Then ask what your $250k buys that $200 can't.
Thoughts?
He is not entirely wrong. But let me show you what that number actually unlocks once you stop thinking like a manager and start thinking like a builder.
I run a full news media company. UnbiasedHeadlines.com. Original reporting, written and published end to end, every day.
Here is what it costs me in tokens: about $200 a day.
Not $250,000 a year. Not per engineer. Two hundred dollars a day.
For that, 16 AI agents do the whole job. They watch the world 24/7. They research the story. They write the piece — our own original journalism, no spin, no agenda, no talking points handed down from an owner. They score it for newsworthiness, generate the audio so you can listen on the drive, and publish it. No human touches the keyboard.
A traditional newsroom needs dozens of people and millions of dollars to do a fraction of that — slower, and with a bias baked into every line.
So sit with the gap. The old model: $250k a year buys you TWO journalists. My model: $200 a day buys you a newsroom that never sleeps, never sells out, and ships 140 original stories every single day.
That is not a productivity tweak. That is a different physics.
And this is exactly what I wrote a whole book about. REPLACEMENT is not a prediction. It is a receipt. The work that used to require a building full of people now runs on a credit card and a handful of agents. I did not theorize it. I built it, and you are reading the output.
The uncomfortable part: this applies to your industry too. Whatever you think makes your headcount safe — the coordination, the judgment, the "you need a team for this" — is the next thing the agents absorb.
Huang is telling you to spend the $250k on tokens. I am telling you what happens to everyone who doesn't.
The question is no longer whether it happens. It is whether you are the one building the agents — or the line item they replace.
Go read UnbiasedHeadlines.com. Then ask what your $250k buys that $200 can't.
Thoughts?