Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy

A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit Both were recruited from Google. ......... 22,000 people worldwide have the skills needed to do serious A.I. research — about double from a year ago. ......... They recruited several researchers with experience at Google and Facebook, two of the companies leading an industrywide push into artificial intelligence. .......... “I turned down offers for multiple times the dollar amount I accepted at OpenAI,” Mr. Sutskever said. “Others did the same.” He said he expected salaries at OpenAI to increase as the organization pursued its “mission of ensuring powerful A.I. benefits all of humanity.” .......... OpenAI spent about $11 million in its first year, with more than $7 million going to salaries and other employee benefits. It employed 52 people in 2016. ........... Some researchers may command higher pay because their names carry weight across the A.I. community and they can help recruit other researchers. ........ “When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star,” Mr. Nicholson of the start-up Skymind said. “You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.” ......... And another researcher, Andrej Karpathy, left to become the head of A.I. at Tesla, which is also building autonomous driving technology........ In essence, Mr. Musk was poaching his own talent. Since then, he has stepped down from the OpenAI board, with the lab saying this would allow him to “eliminate a potential future conflict.”

AI 'prompt engineer' jobs can pay up to $335,000 a year and don't always require a background in technology