{"id":52599,"date":"2025-08-08T11:54:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T11:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/52599\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T11:54:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T11:54:07","slug":"openai-gives-some-employees-a-special-multimillion-dollar-bonus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/52599\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI gives some employees a \u2018special\u2019 multimillion-dollar bonus"},"content":{"rendered":"

The day before the launch of GPT-5<\/a>, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the company\u2019s Slack.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market,\u201d wrote Altman, according to a copy of the message that was shared with me. He announced that OpenAI would give a \u201cspecial one-time award\u201d to researchers and software engineers in a handful of orgs, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut we wanted to be transparent about this one since it\u2019s a new thing for us.\u201d He then thanked employees for their \u201cexcellent work towards building AGI.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bonus amount for each qualifying employee will vary based on role and seniority, according to my sources. The highest payouts will be in the mid, single-digit millions for OpenAI\u2019s most coveted researchers, all of whom already make millions per year. Engineers, meanwhile, are expected to receive bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. The bonuses will be paid out every quarter over the next two years, with the option to receive the money in OpenAI stock, cash, or a mix of both. Roughly 1,000 employees, or about one-third of OpenAI\u2019s full-time workforce, qualify.<\/p>\n

At the same time, OpenAI is gearing up to let more employees cash out millions of their vested stock to investors. Altman has privately said he expects they\u2019ll be able to sell at a much higher share price than the $274 price awarded in OpenAI\u2019s funding round earlier this year, which valued the company at $300 billion. Bloomberg<\/a> reported this week that OpenAI may be valued at $500 billion in the upcoming tender offer.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment. The Information first reported the news that research and engineering employees were getting a one-time bonus, but Altman\u2019s memo is being reported here for the first time.<\/p>\n

OpenAI has never offered such a payout to such a wide swath of employees before. The move highlights how fierce the talent wars for AI talent have become<\/a>. Altman has lost a string of key researchers to Meta in recent weeks, where one of the creators of ChatGPT, Shengjia Zhao, was just named chief scientist. OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer, Mark Chen, has internally compared Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s poaching spree to a home invasion, while Altman has told employees that \u201cmissionaries will beat mercenaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Zuckerberg that Altman has to contend with. My sources say that Elon Musk\u2019s xAI has also been making aggressive offers to lure away OpenAI\u2019s top talent. In addition, ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati recently poached several of the company\u2019s technical leaders to help start her rival lab, Thinking Machines.<\/p>\n

By not giving all of OpenAI the \u201cspecial\u201d bonus, Altman risks breeding jealousy among his employees who worked nonstop on this week\u2019s launches and were left out. For now, though, everyone seems to be riding high from the buzzy release of GPT-5. After Thursday\u2019s launch event, I\u2019m told that Altman joined employees for a celebratory happy hour at Splash, a sprawling sports bar in the Chase Center near OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in downtown San Francisco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The day before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,5025,874,227,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-52599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-command-line","tag-openai","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52599","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=52599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}