Business
Ex-OpenAI Exec Mira Murati’s New Startup Offers…
Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, is leading one of Silicon Valley’s new ventures, and she’s putting her money where her mouth is. After leaving OpenAI in late 2023, Murati quietly launched Thinking Machines Lab, an AI company that’s already causing waves, Business Insider reports.
According to Business Insider, the company has been offering some of the most exceptional compensation in the artificial intelligence industry. Two technical employees were hired at $450,000 annually, and another scored a $500,000 base salary. A fourth, who holds the title of machine learning specialist and co-founder, also receives $450,000 per year. These figures only reflect base salary, not bonuses or equity, which are common additional incentives in startups.
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The numbers come from H-1B visa filings, which publicly disclose compensation for non-U.S. residents. While most companies guard salary details, this data offers a rare look behind the curtain, Business Insider says. For context, OpenAI is paying an average salary of just under $300,000 to its technical team. Anthropic, another major AI player, pays closer to $387,000. Thinking Machines Lab’s average is a stunning $462,500.
Why Top AI Talent Is Flocking To Murati’s Vision
Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion in seed funding at a $10 billion valuation before launching a single product. According to Business Insider, Murati has also managed to attract some of the brightest minds in AI. Her team now includes Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s former chief research officer, researcher Alec Radford, Chat-GPT co-creators John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Alexander Kirillov, a collaborator on ChatGPT’s voice mode alongside Murati.
Business Insider says that Thinking Machines Lab’s website gives little away, stating only that the company is building systems that are more customizable, general-purpose, and better understood by users. Still, the aggressive hiring and sky-high salaries suggest something much bigger is in play.
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Meta, OpenAI, And The $100 Million Talent War
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed that Meta (NASDAQ:META) has been offering $100 million signing bonuses to lure away top AI talent, Business Insider says. Around the same time, Meta struck a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in Scale AI, intensifying the race for top researchers.
According to Entrepreneur, six senior OpenAI researchers have already made the jump to Meta, joining the tech giant’s newly formed superintelligence team. Among them are Shuchao Bi, a co-creator of ChatGPT’s voice mode, and Shengjia Zhao, who played a key role in synthetic data research and helped build ChatGPT itself.
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This wave of departures adds pressure to a talent war already driven by record-high compensation offers. While OpenAI grapples with the losses, leadership is taking action behind the scenes, Entrepreneur says. In a memo sent to staff by Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, OpenAI outlined plans to “recalibrate” salaries and explore new ways to keep top contributors engaged. Altman is said to be personally involved in reshaping the company’s strategy to stay competitive.
Thinking Machines Lab is establishing itself as a major player in a competitive landscape defined by soaring salaries and high-stakes talent moves. With a founder deeply involved in the creation of ChatGPT and compensation packages that rival the industry’s top offers, the company is taking a seat as a central force in the evolving AI ecosystem.
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[NEW YORK] Microsoft is keen to show employees how much artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming its own workplace, even as the company terminates thousands of personnel.
During a presentation this week, chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said AI tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a source familiar with his remarks.
Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than US$500 million last year in its call centres alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the source, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.
The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of US dollars, he said.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Tech executives have been increasingly vocal about the potential for AI to automate labour currently performed by humans. Salesforce has said that 30 per cent of internal work at the company is being handled by AI, allowing it to reduce hiring for some roles. Executives at Alphabet and Meta Platforms have said significant chunks of code are now being written with AI.
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At Microsoft, AI generated 35 per cent of the code for new products, accelerating launch times, Althoff said. The company’s GitHub Copilot is a leader in the market for AI coding tools and has 15 million users, Microsoft said in April.
AI implementation has fuelled replacement anxiety for many workers, particularly in the tech industry. Microsoft has announced cuts of about 15,000 employees this year, with a wave of layoffs last week targeting customer-facing roles such as sales.
Althoff stressed to employees that AI could make them more effective as sellers. Through the use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, each salesperson is finding more leads, closing deals quicker and generating 9 per cent more revenue, he said.
Productivity gains from AI were “not a predominant factor” in the job reductions of recent months, Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith said on Wednesday (Jul 9) during an event announcing a donation of over US$4 billion in cash and technology to schools with a focus on spreading AI skills. BLOOMBERG
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