{"id":448829,"date":"2026-02-27T17:18:31","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T17:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/448829\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T17:18:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T17:18:31","slug":"chatgpt-maker-openai-offers-mega-salaries-as-it-hires-for-london-research-hub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/448829\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT maker OpenAI offers mega salaries as it hires for London research hub"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI is offering mega salaries in a bid to attract new recruits to its London<\/a> research hub.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0ChatGPT<\/a>\u00a0developer has unveiled plans to make the capital\u00a0its largest research hub outside of the US amid a trillion-dollar AI<\/a> arms race between major tech firms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The firm, whose European headquarters are in Dublin, has vowed to significantly expand the size of its London site, where 30 researchers currently work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI said it wanted to grow the centre due to the city’s ‘strong culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration’ as well as its ‘unique concentration of world-class talent’ in machine learning<\/a> and the sciences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mark Chen, the company’s chief research officer, said the tech firm would be offering salaries that were ‘very competitive’ in line with pay packets of rivals such as\u00a0Google<\/a>\u00a0and DeepMind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘AI talent is very valuable, and we need to be competitive everywhere,’ he told The Times, while describing the developer as a ‘bottom-up lab’ which offers employees ‘company-level bets’ in comparison to Google, which is ‘slightly more top-down’.<\/p>\n

Work in the AI space is extremely lucrative, with the average OpenAI employee earning $1.5million (\u00a31.1million) in stock-based compensation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI can offer its employees equity as a private company, which in turn could increase in value if the firm were to do well and go public.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many staff have become very wealthy as they have been able to sell their shares in the firm in the private market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It comes amid a hiring battle in the US as engineers are being offered life-changing wages, with Facebook<\/a> founder Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> allegedly offering researchers as much as\u00a0$1 billion to be a part of Meta<\/a>‘s AI unit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An AI research scientist, at a mid-tier level, at Google DeepMind can earn a salary of up to \u00a3115,000 with a \u00a3330,000 package as well as\u00a0\u00a3185,000 in equity\u00a0and \u00a328,000 in bonuses, according to AI Paygrades.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Google, Amazon and AI are funnelling billions into their AI tech in a bid to bag the title of world’s most advanced AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"OpenAI <\/p>\n

\u00a0OpenAI has shared plans to make London its largest research hub outside of the US (Pictured: Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO on February 29, 2026)<\/p>\n

\"Open <\/p>\n

Open AI said it wanted to grow the centre due to the city’s ‘strong culture of cross discplinary collaboartion’ as well as its ‘unique concentration of world-class talent’ (stock image)<\/p>\n

And despite the billions needed to spend on data centres as well as the drain on natural resources, last year’s earnings reports indicated tech firms were ploughing on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2025 alone, Google planned to spend\u00a0$85billion (\u00a363billion) on constructing its AI infrastructure,\u00a0$10billion\u00a0(\u00a37.4billion) more than initially expected, according to The Guardian, with the figure only anticipated to rise this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amazon set out to spend the ‘vast majority’ of its $100billion (\u00a374billion) budget on developing its AI capabilities that same year – a $20billion\u00a0(\u00a314.8billion) increase on the previous year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg also said his firm was planning to spend ‘hundreds of billions’ on building huge data centres in his native US, which he hoped would be operating this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That year, Meta executives planned to spend\u00a0$65billion (\u00a348.2billion), but this was later predicted to be between\u00a0$64billion\u00a0(\u00a347.5billion) and $72billion (\u00a353.4billion).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Mark Chen, boiled down what he feels is a ‘step change’ in AI to the success of AI agents, software programs which can operate independently.\u00a0
‘It really does feel like we’ve reached a level where, you know, we can rely on them and use them in the real world workforce,’ he said,<\/p>\n

‘I think we’ve really gone from a researcher coming up with an idea, implementing and executing it, to one where it’s more of a handoff.’<\/p>\n

And while he confessed AI has received a ‘more negative’ perception in recent times, he believes it will soon be used in other industries to do ‘analyst-style work’.<\/p>\n

He maintained that while there is a fear of the ‘undefined’ when it comes to AI software, it has its ‘positive uses’.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI is offering mega salaries in a bid to attract new recruits to its London research hub. The\u00a0ChatGPT\u00a0developer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,2151,733,4308,1921,97,1325,388,7203,1324,1996,50,874,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-448829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-dailymail","14":"tag-facebook","15":"tag-london","16":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","17":"tag-meta","18":"tag-new-york-times","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-openai","21":"tag-technology","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom","24":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}