100 million-dollar pay packages aren’t just for the Shohei Ohtanis and Cristiano Ronaldos of the world anymore. In Silicon Valley, nine-figure pay days are reportedly now being floated to the world’s top talent as the race to own AI enters a new frenzied stage.
Meta has made at least 10 high-pay offers of up to $300 million over four years to top OpenAI researchers for what it’s calling its Superintelligence Lab, Wired reported this week. Sam Altman claimed in June that OpenAI workers had been offered $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship. Meta spokesman Andy Stone called news of the reported pay “untrue,” saying “the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place.”
Whatever the actual figures are, it seems a select few researchers could see bank account balances that rival or surpass CEOs at other Big Tech companies — and they would out-earn other tech workers by numbers that are hard to envision. (A BI analysis of Meta’s federal filings last week found that software engineers at the company can make up to $480,000 in base salary.) A former Meta engineer who still works in the tech industry told us that as “top tech talent is finally being treated like top sports” many of tech’s rank and file workers are filled with resentment and jealousy, “especially amongst folks that have been in the industry a while.”
Demand for AI experts far outpaces the supply. Whatever enticing salaries Meta is actually offering must be outsized enough that they tempt people to abandon the sleek, hotbed of AI innovation to take on the task of bringing Meta, a company that bet everything on the metaverse, through yet another rebrand. To achieve Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of building a personalized AI for everyone, Meta no doubt needs to open its wallet.
Zuckerberg seems to be testing now how many zeros he needs to put on a check to get people to come play for his team. But perhaps more than anything, the eye-popping salaries underscore how the divide between top AI talent and the rest of us is becoming not just a gap, but a chasm.
“It doesn’t make sense for engineers, no matter how experienced and with great credentials, to make NBA players’ salaries,” says Natalia Luka, who studies economic sociology, organizations, and science and technology at University of California, Berkeley. The “exorbitant sums” that tech companies are paying, “not just for AI engineers, but also the computing power, the data centers, all of those costs,” she says, is putting enormous “pressure on them to cut costs elsewhere.”
100 million-dollar pay packages aren’t just for the Shohei Ohtanis and Cristiano Ronaldos of the world anymore. In Silicon Valley, nine-figure pay days are reportedly now being floated to the world’s top talent as the race to own AI enters a new frenzied stage.
Meta has made at least 10 high-pay offers of up to $300 million over four years to top OpenAI researchers for what it’s calling its Superintelligence Lab, Wired reported this week. Sam Altman claimed in June that OpenAI workers had been offered $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship. Meta spokesman Andy Stone called news of the reported pay “untrue,” saying “the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place.”
Whatever the actual figures are, it seems a select few researchers could see bank account balances that rival or surpass CEOs at other Big Tech companies — and they would out-earn other tech workers by numbers that are hard to envision. (A BI analysis of Meta’s federal filings last week found that software engineers at the company can make up to $480,000 in base salary.) A former Meta engineer who still works in the tech industry told us that as “top tech talent is finally being treated like top sports” many of tech’s rank and file workers are filled with resentment and jealousy, “especially amongst folks that have been in the industry a while.”
Demand for AI experts far outpaces the supply. Whatever enticing salaries Meta is actually offering must be outsized enough that they tempt people to abandon the sleek, hotbed of AI innovation to take on the task of bringing Meta, a company that bet everything on the metaverse, through yet another rebrand. To achieve Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of building a personalized AI for everyone, Meta no doubt needs to open its wallet.
Zuckerberg seems to be testing now how many zeros he needs to put on a check to get people to come play for his team. But perhaps more than anything, the eye-popping salaries underscore how the divide between top AI talent and the rest of us is becoming not just a gap, but a chasm.
“It doesn’t make sense for engineers, no matter how experienced and with great credentials, to make NBA players’ salaries,” says Natalia Luka, who studies economic sociology, organizations, and science and technology at University of California, Berkeley. The “exorbitant sums” that tech companies are paying, “not just for AI engineers, but also the computing power, the data centers, all of those costs,” she says, is putting enormous “pressure on them to cut costs elsewhere.”
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