Thinking Machines Lab (TML), the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is paying top technical talent up to half a million dollars in salary, according to federal data obtained by Business Insider. The news comes amid intensifying competition among tech giants like Meta and OpenAI, who are actively poaching talent from each other.
According to federal filings, TML paid three technical staffers $450,000 each, while a fourth received $500,000 in compensation. The figures were from the first quarter of this year and included just the salary, not the added sign-on bonuses and equity awards. The federal filings’ data shows how much TML’s hires on H-1B visas were paid.
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Interestingly, these high base salaries were being offered even before Murati secured $2 billion in funding for TML in its latest funding round. The compensation offered is higher than other major players including OpenAI, which reported paying an average salary of $292,115 to 29 technical employees. Anthropic, meanwhile, paid an average salary of $387,500 to 14 employees.
Murati — who left OpenAI in 2024 following six years at the company — announced her plans for Thinking Machine Labs earlier this year. The startup intends to build tools to make AI work simpler for “people’s unique needs and goals,” and create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than those currently available.
While Murati is leading the startup as its CEO, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman — who also did a short stint at rival Anthropic — was hired as chief scientist. Other former OpenAI employees who joined TML include former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, Jonathan Lachman, who led special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, another ChatGPT co-creator; and Alexander Kirillov, who previously worked with Murati on ChatGPT’s voice mode.
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TML also recently raised $2 billion in funding, valuing the startup at a whopping $10 billion, merely six months after its launch. This funding round — one of the largest in Silicon Valley’s history — was led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners. Business Insider further reported that the investors had to commit at least $50 million to take part in the funding round. TML is yet to launch any public facing products.
TML is not the only company offering high salaries in an attempt to lure top talent from other tech companies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that Meta has been offering up to “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that in compensation per year,” in an attempt to lure away OpenAI’s top talent for its “superintelligence” team.
Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent out a sharply-worded memo saying this was like “someone had broken into our homes and stolen something.” OpenAI employees who crossed over to Meta’s superintelligence team include researchers Trapit Bansal, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. Meta has also hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross for the team.