Elon Musk’s feud with Sam Altman has been very beneficial for engineers

Elon Musk and Sam Altman have been in a long-running feud over generative AI, and while the jury’s still out on whether or not this technology is just a bubble waiting to burst, we can say one thing for sure: employees of both companies are hitting it big.

new a report from Business insider Today’s post shows that both Musk’s xAI and Altman’s OpenAI are paying big money to acquire the key talent they need to win. The report examines the salaries of engineers from both startups using publicly available visa application data that companies must submit to hire foreign workers. The data includes job titles and salaries, and shows that Musk’s intense desire to take on OpenAI has done nothing if not put more money in engineers’ pockets.

According to the data, Business insider It found that xAI and OpenAI pay their employees 37% and 87% above the industry wage, respectively. The prevailing wage is defined by the Department of Labor as the average wage paid to workers in certain occupations within a specific geographic area.

xAI only has about 100 employees at the moment and has applied for 10 roles, with the lowest-paid engineer earning $250,000 and the highest-paid $500,000. One employee at xAI, a lead machine learning engineer, was paid nearly double the prevailing wage set by the government. OpenAI has thousands of employees with salaries ranging from $145,000 to $530,000. The salary range is wider there in part because OpenAI has more administrative staff.

None of this new data should come as much of a surprise. The entire tech industry is going through a huge hype cycle around AI, and every company needs to put out these buzzwords in order to please investors.

Add on top of that the history between Musk and Altman. The first is a jilted lover who gave up his position at OpenAI over diverging views, only for the company to become a global sensation just a few years later. It’s like breaking up with a girl only to have a huge glow up years later.

Musk has raised billions of dollars to try to win it back, creating his own rival AI company and a chatbot in the form of Grok, which he says will produce the most free-form chatbot ever. that it I enclosed it with an X In order to somewhat salvage the $44 billion purchase of that company as well. More than $50 billion has been invested between the two projects, which represents a major shift for Musk. It would be a huge blow to his ego if his xAI and Grok chatbot failed.

Musk is also using the courts to try to win, Sue OpenAI In an attempt to prevent it from turning into a profitable company. OpenAI was created by Musk and Altman as a nonprofit focused on AI safety, but the company constantly needs money to support its ambitions, and investors won’t want to invest more if it remains a complex nonprofit. While Musk is correct that he provided the seed money for the express purpose of creating a public benefit, the emails revealed in court also show that he pushed the idea of ​​becoming a for-profit company years ago specifically so that it would be easier to raise. . money. This lawsuit, then, is really just an attempt to slow down OpenAI.

As part of the lawsuit, Musk said OpenAI uses exorbitant salaries in a way intended to stifle competition. It seems like everyone in tech is pretty much a free marketeer, but they’re not.