Mumbai: ChatGPT maker OpenAI has announced massive bonus payouts worth millions of dollars to about 1,000 employees, roughly one-third of its full-time workforce, in a move aimed at retaining top artificial intelligence talent.
On the eve of GPT-5’s launch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a surprise message to staff via the company’s internal Slack platform, informing them of a quarterly bonus for two years for researchers and software engineers working in the applied engineering, scaling, and safety divisions, according to The Verge.
The payouts will vary depending on role and seniority. Top researchers are set to receive bonuses in the mid-single-digit millions, while engineers will get hundreds of thousands. These bonuses will be distributed quarterly over the next two years and may be taken in stock, cash, or a combination of both.
Altman said the rise in compensation was a result of market conditions and the surging demand for AI talent. “As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market,” The Verge cited Altman’s message as saying. “We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company. But we wanted to be transparent about this one since it’s a new thing for us,” he added.
The move comes as competition for AI experts intensifies in Silicon Valley, with tech giants and well-funded startups offering lucrative bonuses to lure talent. Altman has recently seen several key researchers depart for Meta, while Elon Musk’s xAI is also seeking to attract top names in the field.
India is currently OpenAI’s second-largest market after the United States and, according to Altman, could soon overtake the US to become its biggest.
GPT-5, now officially available to all users, is being rolled out with tiered access. Plus subscribers receive higher usage limits, while Pro subscribers gain access to GPT-5 Pro, a version with extended reasoning capabilities for more comprehensive and accurate responses.
According to the company, “GPT-5 is a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model (GPT-5 thinking) for harder problems, and a real-time router that quickly decides which to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and your explicit intent.”
With IANS inputs