OpenAI may be one of the biggest names in the AI industry, but it allegedly falls short of xAI in terms of developer salaries. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, responsible for creating the chatbot Grok, is currently the highest-paying AI company on the market, as reported by Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

Srinivas says that xAI is paying the highest salary to its AI developers, even more than OpenAI, which is currently the most valuable AI startup on the planet. Additionally, Musk himself screens many of the applicants looking to join xAI. Srinivas adds that this makes it difficult for Perplexity to compete with xAI.

Srinivas notes that companies with higher valuations tend to draw in top talent, owing to their ability to provide substantial salaries via stock-based compensation. He emphasizes a strategy centered on attracting candidates who have a genuine interest in joining the company.

Character.ai is also known for its competitive salary offerings. Similarly, Anthropic and OpenAI offer comparable wages, with OpenAI presenting a more uniform compensation structure.

As mentioned earlier, xAI is the startup behind Grok, the AI chatbot that is currently exclusively available to paying X (formerly Twitter) users. Grok is powered by xAI’s first AI model, Grok-1 and it is roughly able to compete and in some cases slightly fall short of GPT 3.5’s performance.

Grok is Going Open Source

Musk has recently announced that Grok will be going open-source soon, following the lawsuit that targeted OpenAI for allegedly deviating from its original mission. In this lawsuit, Musk claims that OpenAI, which had originally aimed to create an open-source AI for all humans is now focusing solely on profit for Microsoft.

Earlier this week on X, a platform which is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire announced that Grok will be going open-source this week.

OpenAI has recently fired back at Elon Musk for targeting the company, revealing eternal emails that show how Elon Musk planned to join his Tesla with OpenAI to make it a “cash cow.” OpenAI added that Musk also had little impact on the startup’s growth and development.

Via: The Decoder