Ahead of the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an internal memo that the company would be giving out "special one-time awards" to researchers and engineers across several divisions, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety, The Verge reports.
About a thousand employees — about a third of the full-time team — will receive bonuses. The size of the payments will depend on the position and length of service: leading researchers can receive up to several million dollars, engineers — hundreds of thousands. Payments will be made quarterly for two years and can be in cash, in the form of OpenAI shares, or a combination.
The company also plans to give employees more options to sell shares. Altman expects the share price to exceed the $274 per share received in a previous round, which valued OpenAI at $300 billion. According to Bloomberg, the next tender offer could value the company at $500 billion.
OpenAI has not previously offered such large bonuses. This move is related to the competition for AI specialists: recently, several key researchers have moved to Meta. It is known that Mark Zuckerberg personally contacted developers and offered them up to $300 million to move to Meta.