Submit a comment
Many of the engineers who threatened to leave OpenAI after the CEO's firing earned $800,000 a year and had influence over the company.
The tech industry has always been known for its high salaries, with engineers at top companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Amid the AI boom, engineers at AI companies are earning 8-12.5% more than their counterparts at regular tech companies, according to data from the platform Levels.fyi.
BloombergStatistics from sources and job postings show that most OpenAI engineers earn between $200,000 and $370,000 a year, while highly specialized positions can reach $450,000. With bonuses, many of the company’s engineers earn as much as $800,000.
Photo of OpenAI employee party shared by former president Greg Brockman on November 22
Earlier in July, Google also leaked its internal salary sheet, showing that most engineers earn between $100,000 and $375,000 a year. The highest paid person on the list is a level 7 software engineer with $718,000. With a bonus of $605,000, this position earns up to $1.3 million.
To be continuedSalary.com, the average salary of a technology engineer in the US is $77,433 a year. Experts assess that the generous income of Google and OpenAI for engineers is to retain talent, preventing them from joining competitors.
The explosion of AI has sent many companies scrambling to find people who specialize in machine learning. The demand for workers in this field is high while there are not many people who are knowledgeable enough about AI, so businesses have to find ways to retain capable engineers. Therefore, such engineers at OpenAI played a key role in bringing Sam Altman back to the position of CEO just days after he was fired. More than 700 employees signed an open letter, threatening to leave the company and join Microsoft if the board of directors did not make concessions.
“The process of firing Sam Altman and removing Greg Brockman from the board jeopardizes all the work that has been done, weakens our mission and our company, and makes it clear that the current board is incapable of providing oversight of OpenAI,” the letter said.
Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and served as CEO before being fired via Google Meet on November 17. The ouster was reportedly due to disagreements over the direction of AI development, as Altman pushed to accelerate the commercialization of the product, while the group of scientists, led by Ilya Sutskever, wanted to maintain the mission of a non-profit organization, building general AI (AGI) in a direction that would benefit humanity.
According to VnExpress