Work perks are taking on new meaning in the AI boom.

Speaking at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on Tuesday, Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna talked about a job candidate who said they would come aboard as long as their team was given a certain dollar amount of AI tokens — the fuel that powers interactions with AI systems.

Lamanna didn’t reveal the exact dollar amount request, but said “you should think of $100 to hundreds of dollars of token cost per day, at the limit.”

The anecdote reflects how access to AI models is becoming as fundamental as salary — and how quickly AI is moving from experimentation to a core part of day-to-day work.

If a “fully loaded” (total cost of an employee to a company) engineer costs $500,000 a year and the employee asks for $100,000 worth of tokens — which makes them three times as efficient — Lamanna said it’s a great deal for everyone involved.

He compared denying engineers sufficient AI resources to stripping away basic workplace tools. Imagine showing up to work with no mouse, no email, no Microsoft Teams — that’s how an engineer accustomed to AI-powered coding agents would feel working under a tight token budget, he said.

“So how you think about what it means to hire, and fully loaded cost, and where we invest is going to change completely as a result of this,” said Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Business Applications & Agents. He sees this happening beyond software engineering — to multiple other forms of office and information work, such as financial planning.

“They’ll be like, I’m not going to work there unless I actually get a certain amount of token budget,” he said.

Lamanna isn’t alone in seeing this shift. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week said AI tokens would become “one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley,” CNBC reported. In a blog post last month, venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz described inference costs as a potential fourth pillar of engineer compensation alongside salary, bonuses, and equity. “Will you be paid in tokens?” Tunguz wrote. “In 2026, you likely will start to be.”

The New York Times last week reported on how employees at tech companies are competing on internal leaderboards that track token consumption, creating a new status game called “tokenmaxxing.”

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta willfully violated New Mexico law by misleading users about the safety of its products and engaging in an unconscionable trade practice, a jury found. The company will face a $375 million penalty for the violations, awarding the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation for 37,500 violations across two counts. The jury decided against Meta on every count, though it declined to award a penalty as high as the state sought, which would have been closer to $2 billion.

It's a landmark verdict delivered just one day after closing arguments. New Mexico argued that Meta had flouted state law by misleading consumers and facilitating child predato …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport nearly five hours before my domestic flight. This is not my way - usually I roll up to the airport 30 minutes before boarding - but not even I have enough hubris to think that my good luck is more powerful than a partial government shutdown. Congress has yet to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, meaning thousands of federal employees from TSA to the Coast Guard are working without pay - or, in the case of TSA, calling out of work, causing staff shortages and hourslong security lines at airports across the country.

On Monday, President Donald Trump deployed between 100 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Epic Games, the gaming giant behind Fortnite, is laying off 82 employees at its Bellevue, Wash.-based office, according to a WARN notice filed with Washington state regulators.

Epic announced Tuesday that it is laying off 1,000 employees across the company, or about 20% of its workforce, citing reduced engagement with Fortnite.

“This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in the announcement. He cited challenges including tougher cost economics, slowing console sales, and competition “against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment.” He noted that the layoffs are not related to AI.

Epic has 349 employees in the Seattle region, according to LinkedIn. The company opened an office in Bellevue more than a decade ago. It previously laid off 39 employees in 2023 at its Bellevue office.

Epic, which currently works out of Lincoln Square in downtown Bellevue, acquired Kirkland, Wash.-based codec creator RAD Game Tools in 2021.

“Market conditions today are the most extreme we’ve seen since those early days, with massive upheaval in the industry accompanied by massive opportunity for the companies that come out as winners on the other side,” Sweeney wrote in his announcement.

Several tech companies have cut staff in the Seattle area this year, including Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile, Smartsheet, Atlassian, MicroVision, and others. Many corporations are slashing headcount to address pandemic-fueled corporate “bloat” while juggling economic uncertainty and impact from AI tools.

Mark Gurman reported today that Apple will finally unveil the new Siri this June at its annual WWDC conference.

The post Apple to Unveil the New Siri at WWDC 2026 in June appeared first on Thurrott.com.