AI Engineers Earn $3 Million to $7 Million
Top Talent Exceeds $10 Million
Startups Face Financial Strain
High Salaries Intensify U.S. Talent Concentration
"The AI talent wars are white hot."
On July 1 (local time), U.S. business media outlet Business Insider reported under this headline that the competition to secure talent in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has become overheated, driving up the value of researchers and engineers. Major big tech companies such as Meta and OpenAI are fiercely recruiting 'superstar' talent in order to gain a technological edge. This excessive compensation battle is fueling a concentration of talent in the United States and a brain drain from Europe, while also placing a heavy financial burden on companies.
According to the Financial Times (FT), the annual compensation package for AI engineers typically ranges from $3 million to $7 million, which is about a 50% increase compared to 2022. For top-tier talent, salaries can exceed $10 million (about 13.8 billion won). Reuters described the soaring value of AI talent and the intense hiring competition by saying that since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, recruiting AI researchers has become as fierce as signing professional athletes.
Some big tech companies, including Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft (MS), are offering high salaries and unprecedented terms to attract talent, further intensifying the competition to secure AI experts. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, recently began actively recruiting industry professionals after the company's latest large language model (LLM), 'Llama 4,' was evaluated as falling short of expectations in reasoning and coding ability assessments. He even reached out to employees at rival OpenAI and succeeded in poaching some key personnel. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently reported that Meta hired three researchers from OpenAI for its superintelligence project.
OpenAI offers industry-leading salaries, but Meta reportedly presented even more attractive terms. CEO Sam Altman said that Meta offered a sign-on bonus of up to $100 million to OpenAI’s top-tier AI engineers. Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer (CRO) at OpenAI, strongly expressed his regret in an internal memo, saying, "It feels as if someone broke into our house and stole something."
Kyle Langworthy, an AI specialist headhunter at Riviera Partners, said, "In recent years, this competition has become almost insanely intense," and added, "Some companies will stop at nothing to secure the talent they want."
The overheated competition for AI talent is putting a heavy burden on startups. Some startups that cannot afford the high salaries are turning to Europe, where labor costs are lower than in the United States.
According to technology recruitment firm Harrison Clarke, the total compensation for mid-to-senior level researchers at big tech companies now reaches $500,000 to $2 million. This is more than double the upper limit compared to 2022, when the range was $400,000 to $900,000.
Thomas Wolf, co-founder of the open-source AI startup Hugging Face, said, "The cost of hiring one software engineer in the Bay Area is enough to hire three to four people of similar caliber in Europe." This highlights the overwhelming cost burden of hiring in the United States.
As more AI talent seeking high salaries prefer the United States, concerns about an AI 'brain drain' are mounting in Europe. CyberNews, a cybersecurity-focused media outlet, analyzed that "AI professionals from Europe, including the Middle East, are leaving for the United States in search of greater compensation and opportunities."
Reuters also pointed out, "The compensation battle to secure AI talent directly translates into a financial burden for smaller startups."
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