SF AI startup reportedly dangling $500K salaries

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — As the artificial intelligence arms race for talent heats up, one new San Francisco-based AI startup is reportedly dangling $500,000 salaries in an effort to lure top talent. Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is paying two members of its technical staff $450,000 while another one got $500,000, according to a report in Business Insider.

Citing hiring data, BI said a fourth staffer at the company, listed as a “co-founder/machine learning specialist, also gets paid $450,000 a year. BI said the data it is citing comes from federal filings companies make when they hire non-US residents on H-1B visas.

Even among the high-flying salaries of the nascent AI industry, these salaries are eyebrow-raising, particularly from a company that has yet to launch a product. A quick glance at available jobs at OpenAI on LinkedIn revealed salaries largely ranging from around $190,000 to about $400,000.

Salaries at Anthropic, another leading San Francisco AI firm, also ranged largely between around $200,000 to $400,000.

Reports of eyewatering salaries at TML come on the heels of separate reporting that Facebook parent company Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses in an effort to poach engineers from OpenAI. One software engineer who did jump ship from OpenAI to Meta denied he had received such a bonus.

TML founder Murati spent over six years at OpenAI, working on the development of the company’s signature ChatGPT product. She was also briefly appointed as interim CEO after the company’s board briefly fired founder and CEO Sam Altman.

According to its LinkedIn page, Thinking Machines Lab has between 11 and 50 employees currently. No jobs were currently listed as available as of Tuesday afternoon.