A tax return from the non-profit organization OpenAI gave an overview of the huge salaries and bonuses paid to professionals in the field of artificial intelligence at Sillicon Valley.

OpenAI donated over $ 1.9 million to its lead researcher, Ilya Sutskever, in 2016. He also donated more than $ 800,000 to Ian Goodfellow, another leading researcher, although he was not hired only in March of the same year. Both were recruited from Google. The third big name in the field, Pieter Abbeel, earned more than $ 425,000, although he did not join the laboratory until June 2016, after taking leave of his professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. These numbers include all signature bonuses.

The figures on the tax forms, which OpenAI is required to publish publicly because it is a non-profit organization, give a new insight into what organizations are able to pay in the AI ​​talent sector. It should be noted that since it is a non-profit organization, the remuneration at OpenAI may be lower than what these researchers can obtain elsewhere since a non-profit organization can not by example offer options on his actions.

The New York Times attributes this explosion in salaries among talented Artificial Intelligence researchers to the fact that “few people understand technology and thousands of companies want to work with AI.” Element AI, an independent laboratory located in Canada, estimates that 22,000 people worldwide have the skills to conduct serious AI research exercises (about twice as much as last year).

People who work for or receive job offers from major technology companies told the New York Times that artificial intelligence specialists with little or no business experience can earn between 300,000 and 500,000 dollars per year in wages and shares. Big names can receive compensation of up to millions.

“The amount of money paid is on the verge of madness,” Wired Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who joined OpenAI after internships at Google and Facebook, told Wired. Zaremba said the big tech companies would offer him two or three times more value than his true market value.

At DeepMind, a London laboratory specialized in artificial intelligence and now owned by Google, the 400 employees cost the company $ 38 million in wages and other compensation in 2016, according to the annual financial reports of the company in Great -Britain. This represents $ 345,000 per employee, including researchers and other employees.

Source : NYT