13 AI Companies that Pay A Bomb to their Researchers

AI is obviously the hottest industry to work in right now. And it would be a dream come true if you got to work at the top AI companies in the world such as OpenAI or DeepMind. But have you ever tried to find out if your favourite company is a generous-pay firm or a tight-budget employer? What is the difference in the annual compensations of these company?

Rora, the company that helps PhD holders negotiate their salaries, published its report on salary negotiations and gave away the average salary each of these AI companies gave to its researchers; and it is quite interesting.

Here is the list of top AI companies and how much they pay their researchers:

OpenAI

The hottest AI startup of 2023, and the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI is on the top of the list. The company pays an annual $865K compensation with an initial compensation of $665K, which gives a negotiated delta of 30%. And the good news is, the company is planning to set up its office in India, possibly in the coming year. 

Anthropic

Possibly the biggest rival to OpenAI and the creator of Claude-2, Anthropic, which was started by former OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, also pays its researchers handsomely. With $855K annual compensation, the company ranks second on the list. 

Interestingly, during the OpenAI fiasco, the board members of the company allegedly approached Dario for a possible merger, wanting to make him the CEO of the company, which he rejected.

Inflection

The creator of the most friendly and personalised chatbot Pi, Inflection pays a huge sum to its researchers as well. Though the initial compensation is unknown, Inflection pays an average of $825K annual compensation to its engineers. 

Inflection was started by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and the famous investor Reid Hoffman, and has a valuation of $4 billion. Although the company is in the big billion dollar club, it has a small team of 35 researchers. 

Tesla

Elon Musk’s Tesla, the AI company behind the self-driving cars and possibly that provides a lot of power to xAI (the company behind Grok), pays an annual compensation of $780k to its researchers. This comes with $702k initial compensation, giving a 11% increase in negotiated delta. 

Amazon

It is interesting to see how startups are paying more than all the big-tech. Amazon is the highest paying big-tech of all with $719k annual compensation. Furthermore, with one of the highest negotiated delta of 38%, the initial compensation stands at $520k annually.

Google Brain

The two research companies under Alphabet, the parent company of Google, pay very different compensations to its researchers. Brain, though being merged with DeepMind, offers an annual compensation of $695k. This is after a 17% negotiated delta, giving a jump from 17%. 

On the other hand, Google Research gives an annual compensation of $549k with a whopping 77% negotiated delta, jumping from $310k annual compensation.

Meta AI

With offices in New York, Menlo Park, and London, Meta AI, formerly known as FAIR, focuses on AI research with its 150k GPUs involving powering its social media platform, along with AI. The research lab of Meta pays $556k annual compensation, with an initial compensation of $480k, signalling a 15% negotiated delta. 

DeepMind

Now merged with Google Brain, DeepMind is touted as one of the alternatives to Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. The “brain” behind the recent Gemini model, DeepMind pays $515k annual compensation to its researchers, with an initial compensation of $452k, and a 13% negotiated delta.

Apple

Apple pays almost half of what OpenAI pays, which is surprising given the difference in valuations of the companies. Well, the employee size matters too. With an initial compensation of $337k, Apple pays $450K annual compensation to its researchers with a 33% negotiated delta.

Microsoft Research

Surprisingly, Microsoft Research, the big-tech’s own research lab pays almost equivalent to Apple, which is the half of OpenAI, its own funded company. Though it gives a whopping 66% negotiated delta along with $270k initial compensation, Microsoft Research’s researchers earn around $449K in annual compensation. 

This is probably why OpenAI researchers didn’t actually want to go to Microsoft when the entire mess happened.

NVIDIA

The biggest winner of the AI race with a trillion dollar valuation owing it all to AI, NVIDIA gives an initial compensation of $340k to its researchers along with a negotiated delta of 14%. Overall, the chip and GPU giant pays $390k annual compensation to its researchers. 

IBM Research

Similar to NVIDIA, IBM Research, the company which balances between quantum computing and AI, pays $377k annual compensation to its researchers, along with a 43% negotiated delta and initial compensation of $262k.

Hugging Face

At the bottom of this list is the open source champion Hugging Face. Though the salaries of the researchers are not less, Hugging Face with its open source approach pays $238k annual compensation to its researchers, along with a 27% negotiated delta and initial compensation of $185k.