Million-dollar salaries and accelerated options: AI talent race has got tech giants in a frenzy

Welcome to The Edge of Tech, CTech's AI-Generated studio. Here, we dive deep into the latest news and analyses on technology and innovation.

In today's edition we discuss how the AI talent war drives up salaries of AI researchers and engineers. In order to recruit employees, companies offer salary packages and benefits in the amount of one million dollars annually, an accelerated track for receiving options, and proposals to transfer entire engineering teams from another company in one fell swoop.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the median salary of six employees who received a job offer from OpenAI was $925,000 per year. The median salary of 344 machine learning and AI engineers was $400,000 a year, including bonuses and options.

On the other hand, high salary is not always a sufficient reason to move to another company. For example, some AI researchers are remaining with the giants because only a few startups have the necessary capital to support the training of large language models. In another case, a Microsoft employee gave up a million dollar bonus and took an annual cut of $100,000 when he moved to an AI startup. This, against the background of enormous trust in the CEO and the expectation that within five to seven years his options in the startup will reach a value of $40 million.

You can read more on the AI talent race here.

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