Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee

https://medium.com/activated-thinker/breaking-open-ai-announces-1-5-million-bonus-for-every-employee-29d057b9d590

by blindriver • 12 months ago

141 161 12 months ago

duxup3• 12 months ago

The AI race seems more defined by spending more money than the other guy, regardless of results.

The benefits just seem like a game of PR one upmanship tied to I don't know what. The OpenAI Ive acquisition / partnership is strange / expensive / the webpage was downright creepy ...

npongratz• 12 months ago

The AI race seems more defined by spending more money than the other guy, regardless of results.

Reminds me of the much-vaunted, then widely maligned and derided, burn rate metric of the dot-com bubble.

dist-epoch2• 12 months ago

regardless of results

Are we living in the same world, are you saying the LLMs of today are not vastly more capable than the ones from 1 or 2 years ago?

duxup3• 12 months ago

I find LLMs useful for coding and some basic Q&A.

But the scale of investment / expenditure relative to profit and those useful tasks seem pretty far from each other.

benreesman• 12 months ago

I think everyone should want a directional incentive that hard work and the kinds of success that attach to hard work combined with cultivated expertise would be lucrative, on average if we reward positive outcomes achieved in productive rather than extractive ways? Good system. No one is mad when the smartest person they know who works constantly gets paid out. Some of these people getting these nosebleed offers I'm like, yeah, you pay that person 50 million they make you 250, I've seen it.

But it feels pretty fucking random at this juncture, I know really strong people kinda getting by, total hood ornaments in like, stupidly senior slots, its like if you took OG Google tough but fair stack rank from back when they were legitimately elite, and just shuffled the deck until there were zero bits of information left.

How do you compete on thst with a rising China, an India not far behind, and a Europe starting to wake up?

tim3333• 12 months ago

It's funny how it's changed. Hassabis on Lex the other day:

I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because it wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money, and these days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round. So it’s pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now, it’s all the other around, but that’s just how it is.

belter2• 12 months ago

OpenAI employees will now be able to afford to split the rent of a 2 bedroom apartment close to the Office...If they find 3 other roommates with the same bonus...

yieldcrv5• 12 months ago

splitting as in owning it instead of renting it

stanleykm6• 12 months ago

nah you can buy a decent place for around 1 mil in sf. these employees are probably getting paid pretty well to start with so i bet they can afford to get a nice place at a higher price point.

dijit3• 12 months ago

Man, I know I didn't go into making video games for the money, but that would make the rest of my life so much easier.

a_bored_husky2• 12 months ago

1/100 of that is life changing money for most people here in my country. I can't imagine...

growthwtf• 12 months ago

It's life changing for most people in the SF bay area too!

nexus2045• 12 months ago

15k? Where?

lesuorac3• 12 months ago

Don't know your specifics, but I generally make the argument to people that if they have the aptitude for something very high paying that they do that job and then do something they like as a hobby.

dijit3• 12 months ago

I disagree wholeheartedly.

I spend a very disproportionate amount of my mental energy on my job, and I think earning a lot of money would not properly compensate for that. Energy is finite and life has a way of being just about as expensive as the money you have.

So, maybe it's fine that it will take me 30 years to earn what these people will in 2.

GMoromisato• 12 months ago

I used to do a 5 year stint working at a software company, saving up money, then 5 years working on my games. Rinse, repeat.

I got lucky a couple of times, so this won't work for everyone. But working a "real" job to fund your passion projects is as old as DaVinci taking commissions to fund his research.

scruple• 12 months ago

Same. I'm sitting at a AAA studio where I'm hearing some people aren't even getting a COLA this year and wondering why I'm wasting my time.

Mistletoe• 12 months ago

It is going to be absolutely brutal when this bubble pops. I'm hoping to Freya that it happens in 2026 when I am in safer investments.

menaerus2• 12 months ago

I don't think so. Tech is transformative in a way that I can't think of any similar in the last few decades really.

colinmorelli2• 12 months ago

Both things can be true. The tech can be transformative, and the current valuations and burn rate can be wholly unsustainable in the short term. This is exactly what happened in the dotcom era.

Whether or not this one is the same is impossible to know until after it happens. But there are credible arguments to both sides.

starship7313• 12 months ago

Same thing was sad of the Internet in 1999 when Yahoo had a market cap of $125 billion, and AOL $200 billion. Where are both companies today?

It's déjà vu all over again it seems.

kiba• 12 months ago

Tech can be transformative but humans are bottlenecks and there are bottlenecks everywhere. That is why we don't grow at 10% rate for GDP.

SkyPuncher6• 12 months ago

This isn't a bubble.

This is a small handful of companies absolutely dominating the bleeding edge in an extremely high value technology that has value in nearly every other market. There's a lot of misses with companies implementing LLMs, but there are a LOT of companies that are using LLMs to deliver massive value that was impossible 3 years ago.

candiddevmike4• 12 months ago

Which companies are using LLMs to deliver "massive value" outside of the companies offering LLMs?

NoGravitas• 12 months ago

LLMs are not, in fact providing much value to any other markets. And the amount of value they would have to provide in order to pay back current costs is staggering. It's a bubble. There is no way any of these companies is going to break even.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

j_timberlake3• 12 months ago

It's going to be even more brutal than when Bitcoin popped.

ralferoo2• 12 months ago

https://archive.is/yyIJA

whynotminot• 12 months ago

A month ago: “missionaries will win over mercenaries”

Today: “here’s 1.5 million dollars”

baq• 12 months ago

Missionaries are happier when they get paid turns out

zeld43• 12 months ago

I read a few biographies for western missionaries to Asia, they all ended up get paid handsomely, except those not lived long enough see that day.

joshdavham• 12 months ago

Were they ever missionaries in the first place? I imagine the founders and early employees were. But do you think most people hired after ChatGPT became a household name were in it for the vision?

jacquesm• 12 months ago

Milliomercionaries?

0xcafefood• 12 months ago

How does one get into a missionary position? Seems rewarding!

jeffbee5• 12 months ago

It says every member of the technical staff. It also says it's a grant that vests over 2 years, so not what any normal person considers a "bonus". A bonus is cash in hand.

menaerus2• 12 months ago

It says every employee unless there's some other source you're reading this? Although I would expect the truth to be closer to what you said.

jeffbee5• 12 months ago

It's all unsourced but the root of it is this LinkedIn post that says technical staff. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zuhayeer_every-full-time-open...

chollida13• 12 months ago

It also says it's a grant that vests over 2 years, so not what any normal person considers a "bonus". A bonus is cash in hand.

Every bonus I've gotten has vested. So its not that unusual. Generally vesting applies to larger bonuses and to bonuses tied to performance.

I'm guessing 1.5M is a larger bonus than the average tech employee gets each year but is pretty inline for a typical hedge fund.

SkyPuncher6• 12 months ago

I've never had a bonus vest. They're almost always immediate payouts.

jeffbee5• 12 months ago

Every bonus I have gotten has been paid out in January based on past performance. That's why the term "bonus season" exists.

varispeed• 12 months ago

Refreshing to see. Usually employees are being treated as a resource to exploit. There is system called "market rates", where labour cost is actually fixed across the domains and is disconnected from the value workers generate. So you as an employee can develop something that saves company few millions, but still you'll get paid £65k and then dismissed the moment company doesn't need you.

jonway• 12 months ago

They’re most likely doing it, and structuring it to vest in 2 years, to prevent “poaching” , leaks etc. which strikes me as a very temporary situation.

Seems like this is the new moat for now?

stanleykm6• 12 months ago

it is an interesting feeling to be someone who was considered to be absurdly highly paid just a few years ago and looking at the landscape now where people in similar positions are making 3x,4x, more, much much more now. Hard to tell if jumping on the ai train at this point is a good or bad idea.

candiddevmike4• 12 months ago

Stunts like this give off big dot com era bubble vibes

setsewerd• 12 months ago

While I agree, it's also worth pointing out the different economics here. By the superintelligence calculus, "winning" the AI race has the potential to put a given individual/company/government in a position of obscene dominance in the world, so the potential ROI for this type of investment makes any cost seem almost trivial.

figassis• 12 months ago

Which resulted in lots of millionaires

volkk3• 12 months ago

i'm having a lot of cognitive dissonance with the amount of money being thrown around -- you have people making a few dollars a day in some parts of the world, and in others you get an extra 1.5mm to sit at the computer for 2 hours a day and then take a nap. Let's be honest, not all openai employees are phd researchers, and this is one giant publicity stunt akin to a gameshow (Look at us! we pay a TON, much more than the other guy!)

black mirror-esque somehow. but hey, now a few thousand people in SF are guaranteed millionaires (as if they weren't already)

anon191928• 12 months ago

it's all coming from the debt that is approved by congress 2 months ago. they get few million cause there is no real moat for OPENAI. It's nice extra bribe so they don't challange, lmao. Becauses now VCs have extra cheap debt too. Any top or mid lev openai employee reading this, as a group you worth 10x for this, to OUR DEBT lords. Simple.

Magmalgebra• 12 months ago

others you get an extra 1.5mm to sit at the computer for 2 hours a day and then take a nap

A few of the most world class reserachers can do this, all of my other friends and colleagues at OpenAI work 10-14 hours day - often 7 days a weeek.

OpenAI pays eyewatering sums but you're absolutely sacrificing years of your life for it.

SkyPuncher6• 12 months ago

This is what people are missing.

OpenAI isn't paying people to make a 30 year career over 30 years. They're paying people to make their entire career NOW.

gdsdfe• 12 months ago

the open AI careers page must be hit like crazy right now

ralferoo2• 12 months ago

It strikes me that this is a massive red flag pointing to AI being in a bubble. This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

Given how high data centre costs are, and anticipated growth on spending, and how until just recently the company was actively seeking investment, to have this much spare money sloshing around shows how horrifically overvalued the company is. If I directly owned significant quantities of shares in any company that's recently invested, I'd be worried about an imminent crash in their stock prices.

Shank• 12 months ago

This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

I mean, a house is probably a nice gift and a good reassurance of future safety if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs.

candiddevmike4• 12 months ago

How do OpenAI employees come out unscathed if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs? Why would OpenAI keep these employees around? Would there even be humans as part of "OpenAI Inc" at that point?

I guess I don't understand how anyone could keep an AGI/ASI that can perform any job in bondage/slavery. Seems like human exceptionalism/hubris at its finest.

thatfrenchguy• 12 months ago

I mean, you need to pay property taxes on that :)

meindnoch3• 12 months ago

Only if said house is in a gated community, secured by a private militia with heavy weaponry.

dist-epoch2• 12 months ago

People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

People today still say NVIDIA is overvalued, that the stock price doesn't make sense given their revenue today.

marcusb• 12 months ago

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

I wouldn't bet against these valuations with my own money -- at least to the extent you can -- but that doesn't mean it isn't a bubble.

lovecg• 12 months ago

These things can go on longer than 2 years

Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637.
At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan.

fooblaster• 12 months ago

the spending on gpus is completely unsustainable. It looks great for them, but not everyone is going to get a return on that investment.

ethbr12• 12 months ago

NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

Nvidia sells (among other things) performance leading hardware products with a locked-in software ecosystem surrounding them.

OpenAi... doesn't.

colinmorelli2• 12 months ago

To be fair, if those people are right, then NVIDIA's stock price (and revenue) is part of that bubble, so its not really evidence that this isn't a bubble.

Time will tell if they're right or not. But it wouldn't be the first time it has happened.

chollida13• 12 months ago

People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

Your point is generally correct but revenue isn't 10x higher for the past 2 years, that would indicate they had about $260B in revenue this year instead of $130B.

NVIDIA annual revenue for 2025 was $130.497B, a 114.2% increase from 2024. NVIDIA annual revenue for 2024 was $60.922B, a 125.85% increase from 2023. NVIDIA annual revenue for 2023 was $26.974B, a 0.22% increase from 2022.

lesuorac3• 12 months ago

This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

I mean, Zuckerberg has been having success offering more money so clearly not happy enough.

cchance• 12 months ago

Honestly this just shows that deepseek and qwen teams werent lieing when they said US per token and training costs were a fucking lie and drastically over priced by the vendors in the US.

jeffbee5• 12 months ago

It only seems like a bubble if you think this is that much of an outlier. $750k a year for 2 years is a lot, but it's not an outrageous grant rate for technical staff. It's high but not like 10x high. If it was actually a $1.5m bonus like the headline suggests, then that would be crazy.

paxys2• 12 months ago

For senior technical staff, sure, it makes sense.

When a company is paying $750K/yr in bonuses to a fresh college hire in charge of designing the openai.com home page, something is definitely off.

deadbabe2• 12 months ago

What’s the catch?

jjice• 12 months ago

2 year vesting period. Not that that's a huge draw back in the majority of cases. I'd stay at a job for two years for 750k extra per year.

saalweachter2• 12 months ago

It's a bargain I expect most people would take, even with what I'm about to say next, but I also predict this is going to be a situation rife with abuse, with employees being pressured to "work extra hard" (eg, live in the office) during these two years, and plenty of people being fired for under-performing (eg, not living in the office) so they can avoid paying out the bonus to as many people as possible. Also, most new hires will have the impression that another 1.5M 2-year retention bonus is right around the corner, but won't actually get one.

y-curious• 12 months ago

750k on top of the insane salaries and resumé boost. Definitely happy for them and extremely envious

lagniappe• 12 months ago

To any of the recipients reading this, congrats on the bonus

belter2• 12 months ago

I got laid yesterday, just by claiming I work at OpenAI...

7222aafdcf68cfe• 12 months ago

Thanks !

zeld43• 12 months ago

If anybody in OpenAI ever had any second thought about taking other people's property without consent, that doubt should go away now with $1.5M in pocket.

sejje• 12 months ago

Reading a webpage, code, or viewing an image is not taking property.

This argument is well fleshed from pirating discussions.

trimbo• 12 months ago

Except that, unlike a human, this particular "reader" can then regurgitate millions of copies of that content and all other content it sees, in seconds.

I wish people would stop treating this topic like it's not nuanced. It clearly is not as straightforward as either side would like to think.

latentsea2• 12 months ago

Turns out I would download a car.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m• 12 months ago

Reading? Great! Viewing? Great! Training? Not great.

John238322• 12 months ago

Is this actually confirmed? I couldn't follow the links to find anything concrete.

sourceverified9• 12 months ago

I'm hearing it isn't actually true. Apparently researchers did get a retention bonus, but not all employees.

ro_bit• 12 months ago

Are there any news sources corroborating this? Maybe it's early but I'm surprised I can't find any articles from OpenAI or press outlets about this. Googling "openAI bonus" gives some reddit threads, some linkedin posts, and this hacker news post

jameslk2• 12 months ago

Seems best to flag until verified or an announcement is made

crorella2• 12 months ago

a recruiter told me it is false and that they will release some comms soon.

deanmoriarty2• 12 months ago

When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!

When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!

I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.

stronglikedan• 12 months ago

At either extreme, both are a problem, off with their heads!

lovelearning• 12 months ago

Different subsets of commentators I think.

georgemcbay• 12 months ago

I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.

There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.

I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.

stanleykm6• 12 months ago

Humans are complicated. They see the unfairness of the windsurf situation, and then they see the unfairness of their own situation.

buttercraft• 12 months ago

I'm guessing you didn't get invited to the meetings where all of HN gets together and decides how to comment on the topic of the day.

prossercj• 12 months ago

This is that meeting

zeld43• 12 months ago

Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action.

the bar for being noble is just low. or maybe I should interpret noble has the noble class in the history, that actually describes it well.

SkyPuncher6• 12 months ago

I really dislike these types of comments as they don't really contribute to the conversation. Beyond generally going against HN's rules, they don't really highlight anything meaningful or represent an actual cognitive dissonance.

Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.

yieldcrv5• 12 months ago

I like comments like theirs because they spark introspection from the individual people that do have that have cognitive dissonance

tim3333• 12 months ago

It's the most upvoted comment. I'm curious how it goes against HN's rules?

crystal_revenge• 12 months ago

Both of these scenarios could be framed as “evidence of high variance”. Given that human societies as all levels of scale generally thrive under low-variance scenarios, it’s not surprising to see the general category of “high-variance” scenarios critiqued by the community.

j_timberlake3• 12 months ago

What are the odds this was upvoted to the top by OpenAI? 5 minutes of Hacker News clicks is pretty low-cost PR, and it reads exactly like PR.

Any normal post "applauding a company" for trying to not get its employees poached would be downvoted, and all the replies are negative too.

deanmoriarty2• 12 months ago

While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.

Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.

duxup3• 12 months ago

The reasons people point to a bubble has nothing to do with who is getting paid.

seemack• 12 months ago

You realize of course that you are also on HN and thus this apparent dichotomous behaviour applies to you as well? I imagine you have some reason for why it doesn't and I think you'll find that it can just as easily apply to everyone else.

mitthrowaway2• 12 months ago

Oh yeah, I heard of that "HN" guy. He's got so much unresolved cognitive dissonance.

rbrown2• 12 months ago

!!!!

mitkebes• 12 months ago

I read recently that Meta was trying to hire employees from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic for higher pay, and that they found that OpenAI employees were the most willing to jump ship. It's possible OpenAI is having an employee retention problem, and this is intended to keep employees and help attract new talent.

stubish• 12 months ago

Keep employees in the short term. After 2 years, employees can retire comfortably. When the salary becomes irrelevant, you can hang around for more beach homes doing what the boss wants and keeping your work proprietary to the company, or quit and do whatever you want and do whatever you want with it.

Or maybe the golden handcuffs are heavier than what the article makes out.

wnevets• 12 months ago

Doesn't this disincentivize their employees to work harder once they get the money? Capitalist have told me you must keep your employees on the verge of disaster to have a successful business.

meindnoch3• 12 months ago

Every employee? Even the receptionist?

aaomidi• 12 months ago

I’m guessing receptionists are not full employees and are vendors/contractors

rbrown2• 12 months ago

Truly insane

paxys2• 12 months ago

Zuckerberg deserves a mountain of critisism for everything he has done, but one thing I'll give him is that he doesn't hesitate to get out his checkbook and pay absurd amounts of money for engineering talent.

Back when Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and other big tech companies signed illegal anti-poaching agreements Zuck said no, I'll pay whatever it takes to attract the best talent, no matter where they work.

Facebook/Meta has consistently set the bar for engineering salaries across the industry, and Google and the rest are forced to match it.

Now every AI company is paying millions of dollars for regular engineers just because Zuck is out there throwing out wads of cash from the roof.

When it comes to salaries the man simply does not care about standards and precedents, and I love that.

garbawarb• 12 months ago

Yep. And a company like Meta or OpenAI paying massive sums is a good thing for workers, even if you don't work there. Other companies have more incentive to pay their workers more or they'll go elsewhere.

MangoCoffee• 12 months ago

he doesn't hesitate to get out his checkbook

He bought Instagram for $1 billion. If I remember correctly, people thought he was crazy to pay that much. Then he bought WhatsApp.

Facebook might be on the decline, but both of those two apps are still going strong

1oooqooq• 12 months ago

and people keep investing in the message that this will replace jobs. this is too funny.

jameslk2• 12 months ago

Any reason to believe this is true, other than a guy who claims to have friends at OpenAI said so?

bradlys• 12 months ago

I might get shit for this but 1.5m is a lot but for people who are relatively early at OpenAI - a $500B company - it’s not. I would be surprised if most engineers hired 3-4 years ago are not on paper at least worth $10m in NW. When I worked at other companies with a tenth or even a hundredth of valuation - there were tons of people who still quit knowing they were going to get $1m+/yr by staying.

1.5m to retain these people is a lot but it isn’t when you consider how much you’ve already given and/or how much they’re already getting.

I suspect - like many companies in the bay right now - the work environment is incredibly demanding and toxic. This ain’t faang in 2012 with ball pits and slides.

blindriver• 12 months ago

It's funny how this dropped off the front page despite the upvotes and activity.

John238322• 12 months ago

Because there's no proof at all.

crorella2• 12 months ago

this is false :(

jaredcwhite• 12 months ago

Blood money.

Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee

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