Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that a software developer should spend the equivalent of at least half of their salary on genAI/LLM tokens. For his hypothetical developer on a $500k/year salary, that means at least $250k in tokens.

Hmm.

I get that code generation has been a rare bright spot in genAI use cases (and even then, not that bright of a spot) but … let's do some math.

$250k/yr in tokens?

➡️ Assuming 260 working days/yr, this is about $960 per day in genAI spend.

I imagine very few, if any, companies would come even close to seeing worthwhile ROI on that. 💰🔥

At current GPT-5.4 pricing, that comes to 55M input + 55M output tokens per workday.

It would be tough for developers to generate that kind of spend. At least, not in any useful kind of way. 💰🔥