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Top OpenAI researchers can earn more than $10 million a

year

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Recent departures from OpenAI have fueled talent arms race

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AI talent scarcity leads to creative hiring strategies

By Anna Tong, Kenrick Cai

SAN FRANCISCO, May 21 (Reuters) -

The contest in Silicon Valley to dominate artificial

intelligence is playing out on a new court: superstar

researchers.

has always been a hallmark of the tech industry, since

ChatGPT launched in late 2022, recruiting has escalated to

professional athlete levels, a dozen people who have been

involved in recruiting AI researchers told Reuters.

"The AI labs approach hiring like a game of chess," said

Ariel Herbert-Voss, CEO of cybersecurity startup RunSybil and a

former OpenAI researcher who entered the talent fight after

launching his own company. "They want to move as fast as

possible, so they are willing to pay a lot for candidates with

specialized and complementary expertise, much like the game

pieces. They are like, do I have enough rooks? Enough knights?"

Companies including OpenAI and Google, eager to get or stay

ahead in the race to create the best AI models, court these

so-called "ICs" - the individual contributors whose work can

make or break companies.

Noam Brown, one of the researchers behind OpenAI's recent AI

breakthroughs in complex math and science reasoning, said when

he explored job opportunities in 2023, he found himself being

courted by tech's elite: lunch with Google founder Sergey Brin,

poker at Sam Altman's, and a private jet visit from an eager

investor. Elon Musk will also make calls to close candidates for

xAI, his AI company, said two people who have spoken to him.

Ultimately, Brown said, he chose OpenAI because OpenAI was

willing to put resources - both people and compute - behind the

work he was excited about.

"It was actually financially not the best option that I

had," he said, explaining that compensation is not the most

important thing for many researchers.

That hasn't stopped companies from throwing millions of

dollars in bonuses and pay packages at star researchers,

according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

A few top

OpenAI researchers who have indicated interest in joining

former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's new company, SSI, were

offered retention bonuses of $2 million, in addition to equity

increases of $20 million or more, if they stayed, two sources

told Reuters.

Some have only been required to stay for a year in order to

get the entire bonus.declined to comment.

Other OpenAI researchers who have fielded offers from Eleven

Labs have received bonuses of at least $1 million to stay at

OpenAI, two sources told Reuters.

Google DeepMind has offered top researchers $20 million per

year compensation packages, awarded off-cycle equity grants

specifically to AI researchers, and has also reduced vesting on

some stock packages to 3 years, instead of the normal 4 years,

sources said.

In contrast, top engineers at big tech companies receive an

average yearly compensation of $281,000 in salary and $261,000

in equity, according to Comprehensive.io, a company that tracks

tech industry compensation.

10,000x TALENT

While talent has always been important in Silicon Valley,

the difference with the AI boom is how few people are in this

elite group - depending on who you ask, the number could range

from a few dozen to around a thousand, eight sources told

Reuters.

That is based on the

belief that this very small number of 'ICs' have made

outsized contributions to the development of large language

models, the technology today's AI boom is based on, and

therefore could make or break the success of an AI model.

"sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x

engineer/researchers...," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late

2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software

engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in

the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x)

as effective as the average.

The of OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, who

then founded a rival AI startup, has intensified the AI talent

war. Murati, who was known at OpenAI for her management skills

and execution prowess, recruited 20 OpenAI employees before

announcing her company in February. She has now lured even more

researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now

around 60 people,

two

sources told Reuters. Though the company has no product in

the market, Murati is in the middle of closing a

record-breaking

seed round that is, based on the team's strength. A

representative for Murati declined to comment.

The scarcity of talent has forced companies to approach

hiring creatively. Zeki Data, a

data firm focused on identifying top AI talent

, said it is employing sports industry data analysis

techniques like the one popularized by the movie "Moneyball" to

identify promising but undiscovered talent. For instance, Zeki

Data discovered Anthropic has been hiring researchers with

theoretical physics backgrounds, and other AI companies have

hired individuals with quantum computing backgrounds.

Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment.

"On my team, I have extraordinarily talented mathematicians

who wouldn't have come to this field if it weren't for the fast

progress that we're seeing now," said Sébastien Bubeck, who

left

his role as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft ( MSFT )

last year to join OpenAI. "We're seeing an influx of talent from

all fields going into AI now. And some of these people are very,

very clever, and they make a difference."