Hi,

Was wondering what the new grad salary for OpenAI generally is. I've seen some undergrads from top universities (MIT, Stanford, CMU) working there full-time straight out of college. Also, can undergrads apply for research roles, or are those mainly for PhDs?

Hi guys. I saw a story online stating that ml engineers are being paid 800k per year. I was taken a back by this news. Is even half those salary possible with my omscs degree? Whats your experience after graduating?

In 2019, OpenAI changed from a nonprofit to a ‘capped profit’ model in an effort to raise capital while still serving their mission.
Per their blog post, “The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.”
How does an OpenAI offer work?
There are two components to OpenAI’s offer: the base salary and the ‘equity,’ which they call ‘Profit Participation Units’ or ‘PPUs.’ The base salary is standard and self-explanatory. It’s the cash paycheck you get every two weeks.
The profit participation units are where it starts to get confusing, as companies sometimes use profit participation or profit interest grants differently.
Here’s a recent OpenAI offer (see all OpenAI offers here), where you can see a base salary of $300k/year with a $2M PPU grant that vests evenly over 4 years, bringing the yearly total compensation to $800k.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

What is your base salary? What do you do - at a high level? And how many years have you been in your field?

Get your flex on, so we can all learn, and be motivated

(No mid-sized, run of the mill, not well known companies please. No consulting, health or law fields either)

Seems like they’re picking up this new form of equity compensation that’s more rooted in profits called PPUs. Fairly interesting: https://nyts.link/https:/www.businessinsider.com/openai-unique-compensation-package-among-tech-companies-ppu-2023-6

anyone else been thinking about this/other forms of equity compensation?

OpenAI is hiring sales people like crazy, and the comp plan is unique. The company is looking to fill 40 new slots to begin to tackle high demand from its customer and prospect base.

There's a lot too it, but for sake of being concise.

Salary: Fully Guaranteed, no comission. Ranges are 300 - 400k. competitive with industry.

Equity Comp: 1 - 2M grant with a multiple cap of 10x.

I've neither heard of a fully guaranteed salary or a capped equity grant at the IC level.

Curious to everyone's thoughts. Also, I am not interviewing for a role, this is just what i've heard through the grape vine, so if someone knows more or wants to correct me, by all means.

I went through the OpenAI (non-profit) Form 990 from past years, posted in full and also summarized here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810861541

Few interesting things I found, data only goes up to 2021 though:

• The board members, including the 4 who voted to oust Sam Altman, all earned $0 salaries in the past several years from the non-profit arm.

• Ilya Sutskever's salary is less than $300K almost every year, which means he makes less than the median software engineer at FAANG or big tech (to be clear, it's a great salary, and higher than most SWEs in the US, but doesn't compare to FAANG salaries especially in the Bay Area)

• I don't see any high-paid SWEs or senior staff / directors in the Form 990s, maybe they're getting their salaries paid from the for-profit private arm?

Can someone please explain why after 2020, other researchers were not paid the same as Ilya or Greg? also the first 4 years, the list has names of John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, Zaremba. These names are gone from the list since 2019.

Everyone is flocking to AI companies (rightfully so for a good career move), how is it to work for OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies (not big tech AI)? The pay is attractive, even a base pay touches 300-400k. How is work life and pace

Hi,

Was wondering if there's any new grads (or lurking experienced devs) who know what working at OpenAI is like, what teams are out there, things along those lines...

Thanks in advance!