Up to $500,000 salary: How former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati attracts top talent to her new AI startup
The new AI startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is betting on record salaries in the fight for the best talent. This is how much they can earn.
Thinking Machines Lab (TML), the much-discussed and secretive AI startup, was founded earlier this year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Even before launching its own products, the company has already invested millions to attract top talent from the industry.
Internal hiring documents obtained by our colleagues at Business Insider show that TML pays individual technical employees a base salary of between $450,000 and $500,000 (€380,860–€423,200).
One employee is listed as a "co-founder/machine learning specialist" and also receives $450,000 a year. These figures come from the mandatory H-1B visa disclosures that U.S. companies must submit when hiring non-U.S. citizens.
They only include base salaries and exclude lucrative signing bonuses or stock options, which often make up the largest part of total compensation in startups.
In comparison, the average base salary for technical staff at OpenAI is around $292,000 (€247,240), according to the documents. The highest-paying position there is $530,000 (€448,570), and the lowest is $200,000 (€169,270).
At Anthropic, technical employees earn an average of about $387,500 (€327,950), with salaries ranging from $300,000 (€253,900) to $690,000 (€583,990).
The data refers to the first quarter of this year – before TML raised seed funding of two billion dollars (1.7 billion euros) at a valuation of ten billion dollars (8.5 billion euros), as Gründerszene previously reported.
The competition for the best minds continues to escalate: Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Meta was trying to lure developers away with switching bonuses of up to $100 million (€84.6 million).
In addition to the high salaries, TML also boasts well-known names from the industry: Bob McGrew, former head of research at OpenAI, joined the team, as did researcher Alec Radford. John Schulman, who contributed to the development of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, former head of special projects at OpenAI; and Barret Zoph and Alexander Kirillov, both closely involved in ChatGPT, are now at TML. According to the company's website, no further applications are currently being accepted.
Mira Murati herself spent around six and a half years at OpenAI, where she was instrumental in the development of ChatGPT and other AI initiatives. In November 2023, she was appointed interim CEO following the short-term dismissal of Sam Altman. Upon Altman's return, she returned to her role as CTO before leaving OpenAI earlier this year to found Thinking Machines Lab.
Read also
businessinsider
