OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI has created the most “intense talent market” he’s ever seen.
AI companies are now paying top AI researchers and engineers as much as superstar athletes.
Altman, however, thinks the talent pool is likely bigger than the market realizes.
There’s a new slate of MVPs in the labor market.
Over the past several months, a talent war has been rippling through Silicon Valley as companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic vie for an elite group of the best and the brightest working on artificial intelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “most intense talent market I have seen in my career,” on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday, a day after OpenAI released GPT-5, the latest iteration of its flagship model.
Altman, however, says that fighting over a chosen few may not be necessary.
“I bet it’s much bigger than people think,” he said, referring to the available talent pool. “Some companies in the space have decided that they’re going to go after a few shiny names, but I think there’s like many thousands of people that we could find, and probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the world who are capable of doing this kind of work.”
Meta, which recently brought on Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to co-lead its newly created Superintelligence Labs, made at least 10 offers of up to $300 million over four years to top OpenAI researchers. It also offered OpenAI employees huge signing bonuses to make the switch. Business Insider earlier reported that researchers at many of the top AI startups are earning in the mid-six-figures for their skills.
More than any other field, AI bets on potential over proven track records, as companies race toward still-theoretical goals like artificial general intelligence and superintelligence.
The real value of top AI talent, Altman said, lies in their capacity for breakthroughs.
“The hope is they know how to discover the remaining ideas to get to superintelligence, that there are going to be a handful of algorithm ideas, and a medium-sized handful of people who can figure them out,” he said.
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