The week was rich in turns and turns for Operai employees. Between the announcement of ChatgPT-5 or two new open source models, the employees of the new Californian company were surprised to receive an exceptional premium.
The announcement was made by Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, through a simple message in Slack. “As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we examined the remuneration of our technical teams given the evolution of the market,” said the entrepreneur, in the message consulted by The Verge.
Variable bonuses depending on the occupied post
He then announced that OPTAI would offer an “exceptional bonus” of several million dollars to researchers and software engineers from some departments, including those responsible for applied engineering, scale and security.
In total, 1,000 employees, or around a third of the full time of the company, are affected. But not everyone will be paid the same quantities. According to the US media, the amount of the premium paid to each employee will vary depending on the maintained position and seniority. The highest bonuses, in the order of several million dollars, will be paid to the most coveted researchers in OpenAI. For their part, engineers must receive bonuses of an average value of several hundred thousand dollars.
The premiums will be paid each quarter over the next two years, with the possibility of receiving money in the form of operai shares, species or a combination of the two.
The talent war was unleashed
This is the first time in the history of the Californian company. Operai has never proposed such a sum to such a large number of employees before. An election that illustrates the war of talents that is enraged in the AI sector. In fact, Sam Altman’s start-up saw some of his engine shaped engineers. Shengjia Zhao, one of Chatgpt’s creators, was, for example, the scientific director appointed in the finish line.
Since last July, the Mark Zuckerberg group has been putting difficult bites to become an important player in the sector and attract the cream of AI engineers. In recent weeks, the technological giant has recruited fifteen new talents in exchange for amazing bonds.
Some managers who occupy very high management positions have been offered more than $ 100 million in bonus. However, the sum, distributed for four years, is linked to the performance objectives. Ruoming Pang, team manager who works on “foundations models” in Apple, also offered a bonus of 200 million dollars, mainly in the form of shares.
According to The Verge, Xai, Elon Musk’s company, has also made aggressive offers to decaccapulate the best talents in Openai. Faced with these attempts, Sam Altman trusts, however. The boss simply assured his employees that the “missionaries will overcome mercenaries.”
Source: BFM TV
