The highest paying AI jobs: $650k salaries
High paying jobs in artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, but roles offering $300k+ salaries are few and far between. An industry like financial services, which has reiterated its commitment to AI countless times, should be paying top dollar for talent, and yet is outshone by contemporaries across the tech sector. Among them all, however, who pays the most?
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We've examined salary data from the H1B Visa Salary Database for 14 companies, including hedge funds, banks, startups and tech giants. It's worth noting that salary data is not wholly reflective of total compensation (it's only salary), and nor is the database wholly reflective of a global company's pay habits (it only applies to H1B visa recipients), but that it still provides some interesting insights. The top paying firm on average might surprise you.
The H1B database suggests that generative AI research firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, the names behind ChatGPT and Claude, pay the highest salaries for AI talent. The top firm, another AI lab called Thinking Machines, is less known to the general public, but was founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Murati turned down an offer of one billion (yes, billion) dollars to join Meta as she was building her firm; she said that none of her subordinates, who Meta also attempted to poach, left the company. Presumably, total compensation is equally impressive.
While Thinking Machines pays the most on average, it also has a smaller sample size than the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. When looking at the highest salary, it drops down to fourth, with the aforementioned AI labs and quant hedge fund D.E. Shaw finishing above it.
What are the top paying companies for AI in finance?
D.E. Shaw appears to be the most lucrative place to work as a 'member of technical staff' (the new job title of choice for AI specialists), but your options beyond that seem limited for $300k+ salaries.
The majority of AI roles at these firms paid, on average, between $180k and $220k. The two firms below that threshold were both in finance: investment bank JPMorgan and hedge fund Point72.
While the seniority of Point72s AI staff isn't clear, JPMorgan's AI hires on H1Bs were predominantly associates. They earned $155k on average, while VPs earned $182k and one executive director was on a salary of $300k.
Balyasny, which has one of the more notable AI research teams in the hedge fund industry, hasn't hired anyone on H1Bs this year despite growing. H1B listings for previous years show that senior researchers can earn salaries of $275k there.
Are AI jobs in finance competitive?
One financial services headhunter told us they see "remarkably little demand for AI/ML skills" in finance; "it surprises me not to see more demand." When looking at the pay you can earn elsewhere working in AI, though, it's no wonder so few are joining the industry. The headhunter said these massive figures are "being paid to a few, not most," and that "financial firms hiring these folks are competing with the rest of the world for them."
If the pay isn't too competitive, then the work itself would need to be exciting too. This doesn't always appear to be the case. One engineer at a major bank criticized finance firms' tendencies to keep staff in the office and the expectations of long hours. Another engineer told us that the highly regulated nature of banking prevents firms from adopting the most effective AI tools, and that leadership has overcommitted to AI without understanding how it works.
Not all jobs are like that. An AI technologist in banking recently held an AMA in The Bubble, our new anonymous community; she said that, once banks shift their focus from LLMs to smaller language models, they'll see "better cost-benefit as [those language models are] better tailored to meeting our domain specific use cases… especially where regulatory requirements are critical."
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