Over the past year, OpenAI has ushered in a boom in artificial intelligence (A.I.) that has fundamentally remade businesses around the world. Workers now use the organization’s A.I.-powered chatbots to generate everything from code to presentation text to customer-service responses. Given that impact, it’s worth asking how much OpenAI pays its software engineers responsible for such rapid advances.
For an answer to this question, we can turn to levels.fyi, which crowdsources technology professionals’ compensation data. Here’s how much OpenAI pays its midlevel software engineers; we also compared it to midlevel engineer compensation at some of the biggest names in tech, including Google and Amazon:
(Yes, we know that crowdsourcing isn’t the most scientific way of determining anything, including compensation numbers; however, we tend to trust the methodology and sample sizes of levels.fyi.)
Based on this data, it seems as if OpenAI’s software engineers command a compensation premium. At most of these other tech giants, engineers would have to climb several additional ranks before they begin to pull down compensation equivalent to what an L4 at OpenAI makes. For OpenAI employees, equity is the key driver of this superior pay.
Obviously, OpenAI is distributing this kind of cash because its engineers are very highly specialized. It’s also a defensive maneuver of sorts: given the incredible demand for A.I. talent, these engineers could just as easily find a home at Google or a similar rival willing to pay big bucks.
Even if you have no intention of landing a job at an A.I.-centric company like OpenAI, learning A.I.-related skills can make you increasingly valuable as a tech professional. Last month, CompTIA classified 65,241 jobs as “emerging tech,” and 19,100 of those involved artificial intelligence in some way. You can quickly boost your A.I. knowledge via online courses; for instance, online learning portals such as Coursera have courses from the likes of DeepLearning.AI, IBM, Vanderbilt University, and other institutions. If you want to learn generative A.I. skills as fast as possible, Google also has online tutorials.
Master the necessary A.I. skillsets, and you’ll likely see an uptick in compensation. Last year, a study by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Access Partnership found that employers “are willing to pay an average of 47 percent more for IT workers with A.I. skills.” And the battle for A.I. talent is only growing fiercer.
