AI Startups Offer Staggering Salaries to Attract Top Talent in Competitive Market

This New AI Startup Led By a Former OpenAI Exec Is Doling Out $500,000 Salaries

TML has yet to launch a product but says it is working to make "AI more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable," according to its site. The $10 billion AI startup Thinking Machines Lab (TML), which was founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati in February, is paying its technical talent up to half a million dollars in salary, according to federal data obtained by Business Insider. The federal filings, which show how much TML's hires on H-1B visas were being paid, showed that the company paid three technical staffers $450,000 each, while a fourth received $500,000 in compensation. The figures were from the first quarter of this year and just included salary, not added sign-on bonuses and equity awards. The H-1B allows U.S. employers to hire non-U.S. residents to work in specialty occupations. Related: Here's How Much a Typical Salesforce Employee Makes in a Year The compensation is more than some major players, including Murati's former company, OpenAI, which reported paying an average salary of $292,115 to 29 technical employees. Anthropic, meanwhile, paid an average salary of $387,500 to 14 employees. Murati spent six and a half years at OpenAI before stepping down as CTO in September. TML has yet to launch any public-facing products, though the secretive startup raised $2 billion in seed funding last month at a $10 billion valuation. Its website says that the startup is working "to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable." In fact, six top OpenAI researchers have joined Meta in the past few weeks as part of its new superintelligence team. The group included Shuchao Bi, co-creator of ChatGPT voice mode, and Shengjia Zhao, who co-created ChatGPT and previously led synthetic data at OpenAI. Still, according to a leaked memo sent by OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen on Saturday to staff, the company isn't "sitting idly by." Top OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, are "recalibrating" compensation and finding "creative ways" to reward talent, Chen noted.

AI Startups: What OpenAI, Anthropic Pay Their Technical Staff | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI is paying salaries of $200,000 to $530,000 a year to 29 technical staffers, according to Business Insider, which cited federal filings required for hiring people who need H-1B visas to work in the U.S. Anthropic has shelled out $300,000 to $690,000 to 14 people, per the report. Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is paying $450,000 to $500,000 to four technical staffers. These figures are base salaries and do not include sign-up bonuses or stock options or grants. The federal filings were made before Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's hiring spree that saw the company pay $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI and hire away its co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that Meta is offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million with even larger annual compensation packages. But Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reportedly said Altman was being "dishonest" by implying the nine-figure offer is for "every single person." Read more: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Announces Launch of Thinking Machines Lab Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI, has reportedly raised $10 billion in debt and equity. According to CNBC, half of the funds are in secured notes and term loans and the rest through a strategic equity investment. The news outlet cited Morgan Stanley as the source of the information. Morgan Stanley said the funds raised will be used to support xAI's "continued development of cutting edge AI solutions, including one of the world's largest data centers and its flagship Grok platform." The latest debt offering was said to be "oversubscribed," meaning there was more demand than supply, and included "prominent global debt investors." XAI's funding round comes as leading AI startups are raising capital in the billions, stratospheric sums compared to what startups have raised historically. The startup expects to spend $13 billion this year while bringing in $500 million in revenues. AI companies that are building foundation or frontier models typically have to spend billions due to the intense workloads needed to keep training their models using special AI chips like GPUs. But those building applications on top of these models don't need such high sums. In March, xAI bought X (formerly Twitter) for $45 billion to create a generative AI-powered content platform. Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly trying to raise $29 billion from private investors to build AI data centers in the U.S. According to the FT, $3 billion would come from investors including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco. The rest would be raised in a debt offering. Meta's Recent AI Hires to Lead New 'Superintelligence Labs' Unit