The boom in artificial intelligence has triggered a competition for the best skilled workers in the USA. AI specialists can expect salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars plus hefty stock options. Entire teams are sometimes poached.
Meta pays its AI experts a median salary of $400,000 per year.
Andrew Brookes / Imago
America’s tech sector is known for paying very high salaries – but the current competition for artificial intelligence experts is taking pay to new heights. Tech companies and startups alike are vying for the best computer specialists who can program large language models (so-called Large Language Models or LLM), are familiar with problems like AI hallucinations, or have experience selling AI software solutions. In doing so, they enter into fierce competition with each other – and with universities.
$925,000 for an AI engineer
A look at the database on the Levels.fyi platform shows what enormous wages AI experts are now paid; There, employees can report their salaries voluntarily and anonymously.
According to the platform, the median salary of six AI engineers who started at Open AI was $925,000 annually, including bonuses and stock options. According to Levels.fyi, the Facebook group Meta paid 344 machine learning and AI experts a median of $400,000 per year, also including bonuses and stock options.
AI engineers are earning better and better wages in the USA
Median annual salary in the United States, in dollars (in thousands)
Accordingly, the median salary of a software engineer with an AI focus in the USA – as the sum of salary and stock options – is currently $251,000. According to the analyzes by Levels.fyi, there are clear regional differences: in San Francisco it is more than 315,000 dollars, in the Denver region it is only 60 percent of that. A global analysis shows that in Switzerland the median salary for the professional profile in question is the equivalent of $197,000, while in Ireland it is $93,000. However, when asked, Levels.fyi points out that there are fewer data points from other countries than from the USA.
Switzerland pays the best AI salaries outside of the USA
Total compensation including stock options and salary for a software engineer with a focus on AI, in dollars, April 2023 to April 2024 (in thousands)
Basically, it is currently shown that candidates with AI specialization earn significantly more than those without this focus, writes the platform in a recently published report. On the career network Linkedin, for example, engineers with an AI specialization earn $239,000 as beginners and those without such a focus earn $221,650. The salary differences become larger over the course of a career, the report says.
Open AI poaches AI experts from Tesla
Not only AI engineers benefit from the increased wages, but also specialists who work with AI products in other functions. The demand for sellers of AI software has also increased enormously, reports the Wall Street Journal: Candidates with experience in this area now earn twice as much as sellers who sell business software, for example.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to retain their existing AI experts. A corresponding specialist at Google told the Wall Street Journal that he had received noticeably more offers from competing companies in the past few months than in previous years. Google recently paid him a bonus in the form of additional shares so that he wouldn’t leave.
“The talent war over AI is the craziest talent war I have ever seen,” the entrepreneur Elon Musk recently wrote on the platform moved to Open AI and the software company Salesforce – and to Musk’s own new AI startup xAI.
Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them.
They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
The AI company Open AI in particular is “aggressively approaching Tesla’s engineers with very high pay offers,” Musk wrote on
Startups offer generous stock options
The generous offers for AI experts are even more remarkable when you realize that tech companies are continuing to lay off employees in other segments – a trend that has been going on since the end of 2022. But these layoffs also free up resources to finance the current AI boom.
Startups usually cannot offer the same exorbitant salaries as tech companies, but can offer more lavish stock options. In an attempt to attract the best AI experts, young companies are sometimes prepared to make “extremely generous” concessions, Alex Libre from the recruiting firm Einstellen Talent, which specializes in AI experts and startups, told “Business Insider”. He saw an AI machine learning expert who received 4 percent of the outstanding shares of a startup, “this has never happened before.”
The Swiss Daniel Graf, who has been working in Silicon Valley and investing in startups for twenty years, advises them against entering into a bidding competition for the best AI talent. “Counteroffers create a false dynamic,” he says. The best people don’t care about every dollar anyway, but about having fun at work.
What is particularly remarkable for Graf is how popular researchers have suddenly become. For a long time, “researchers” had a reputation for being somewhat unworldly, he says. “But suddenly these very people are at the center of everything.” There are only a few people in the world who really understand the foundation models underlying AI – and these people are now extremely sought after.
Entire departments are poached
In the global race for dominance in the field of AI, some companies are not content with poaching individual experts, but are making advances to entire departments.
Justin Kinsey, president of semiconductor recruiting firm SBT Industries, told the Wall Street Journal that last year four of his corporate clients asked him to poach entire engineering teams from competitors. The idea behind this is that no time is wasted in teams getting to know each other and getting used to each other.
“What we observe in the global AI ecosystem, especially in the SF Bay Area, is that entire teams are approached and offered to poach them for five to ten times their current salary package,” says Philipp Stauffer, co-founder and Partner of venture capitalist Fyrfly Venture. This is particularly true for AI engineers who have extensive experience in training AI models.
However, shares weigh heavily in many of these offers, and the subscription rights are often structured in such a way that it is difficult to leave the company early. Stauffer says he has seen five-year plans in which all subscription rights only took effect at the end of last year.
Millions of dollars for AI experts
But a bidding competition for the best AI experts has broken out not only among tech companies, large and small, but also between research and the private sector.
The Swiss neuroscientist Silvana Konermann, who, among other things, teaches at Stanford as an assistant professor of biochemistry, recently told an event in San Francisco how AI experts at universities are sometimes offered “eight-figure amounts”. Entire research teams would be contacted by tech companies.
Investor Stauffer says he’s reminded of the time when Uber poached the entire robotics team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh a few years ago. “But now it’s even more extreme. This will all go back to normal at some point. But I’m sure the current extreme demand for AI talent will take longer.”
There is correspondingly great interest in further training in the field of AI. The Wharton School at the University of Pittsburgh, which specializes in economics, recently offered a four-day training course for managers in the area of generative AI and business transformation in San Francisco. According to media reports, the 50 places at $12,000 each were fully booked within a very short time.