OpenAI will pay $1.5 million in bonuses to 1000 "best" employees to keep them from leaving for competitors

OpenAI is striking a blow in the fight for AI talent and plans to allocate about $1.5 billion in bonuses for a thousand of its best employees.

According to The Information, the prizes will be awarded to the best engineers and researchers among those who may be lured by tech giants. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has already been awarded perhaps the largest offer in the history of AI, offering a top neural network engineer from the Abel startup $1.25 billion over 4 years. To his great surprise, he refused.

The buy-or-bust approach was intensified at Meta after the company’s internal AI projects failed. Zuckerberg personally “recruited” Google DeepMind researchers through emails and still managed to hire at least three OpenAI specialists. In the latter case, bonuses of $100 million were promised for signing the contract allegedly never paid, Obviously, the OpenAI bonus plan is designed to prevent such “thefts” in the future.

According to Hyperbolic Labs co-founder Yucheng Jin, even beginners will receive bonuses, instantly becoming dollar millionaires. He compares this situation to the “wealth effect” at Nvidia, where many of employees own shares in the company and have benefited significantly from the demand for AI chips

The news about bonuses in OpenAI appeared against the backdrop of the GPT-5 launch — the company’s latest flagship AI model that combines reflection with rapid response. GPT-5 has performed better than its predecessors in writing, coding, and healthcare tests, and has a significantly lower rate of hallucinations. The model is being rolled out gradually to all users, although free users will have some limitations.