By News18
The race to lead the future of AI is heating up. Big tech firms and new startups are doing everything they can to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence. And now, raising the ante is Thinking Machines Lab (TML), a secretive AI startup launched earlier this year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
According to a report in Business Insider, TML has been offering massive salaries to its technical team despite not having launched any product yet.
According to hiring data reviewed by Business Insider, TML is paying some of its early hires annual base salaries of $450,000 (approximately Rs 3.8 crore) to $500,000 (Rs 4.27 crore). A fourth staffer, listed as a 鈥渃o-founder/machine learning specialist,鈥 is earning $450,000 a year.
The data comes from the federal filings that companies must submit when hiring non-US workers on H-1B visas. The H-1B program allows US companies to hire up to 85,000 foreign workers with specialised skills annually.
These documents offer a rare glimpse into the salaries of some of the brightest technical minds in the rapidly expanding AI sector. Notably, the figures exclude bonuses and equity grants, which often make up a significant portion of compensation at early-stage startups. What鈥檚 striking is that these high base salaries were being offered even before Mira Murati secured $2 billion in funding for TML, which is now valued at an estimated $10 billion. According to the filings, the average annual salary for the four TML hires is $462,500 (approximately 鈧3.95 crore), significantly outpacing the pay scales at rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
In comparison, OpenAI pays its 29 technical staffers listed in the filings an average of $292,115 (approximately Rs 2.49 crore). The highest base salary at OpenAI is $530,000 (Rs 4.5 crore), while the lowest is $200,000 (Rs 1.7 crore). Anthropic, another major player in the large language model space, pays an average of $387,500 (Rs 3.3 crore) to 14 technical hires. Its highest-paid staffer earns $690,000 (Rs 5.9 crore) while the lowest is paid $300,000 (Rs 2.5 crore).
TML has also built a powerhouse team by bringing in key names from the AI world. Among those who joined the company are Bob McGrew, OpenAI鈥檚 former chief research officer; Alec Radford and John Schulman, both known for their roles in creating ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, who led special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, another ChatGPT cocreator; and Alexander Kirillov, who previously worked with Murati on ChatGPT鈥檚 voice mode.
At the moment, TML is not accepting new job applications, according to a note on its website.
Murati worked at OpenAI for six and a half years and was a key figure in the development of ChatGPT. She briefly served as interim CEO in November 2023 during the leadership shake-up that saw Sam Altman being fired and later reinstated.
Earlier this month, Altman accused Meta of offering signing bonuses of up to $100 million to lure AI researchers away from his company. Meta has launched a 鈥淪uperintelligence鈥 team. It recently brought on Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, as part of a $14.3 billion deal to acquire a 49 per cent stake in his company.