Imagine a job market where there are several hundred candidates all over the planet, and buyers are dozens of companies with unlimited budgets. This is roughly what hiring in frontier AI looks like now. Euronews has collected five names that Meta, Google, OpenAI and everyone else are hunting for. We tell you the most interesting.
Imagine a job market where there are several hundred candidates all over the planet, and buyers are dozens of companies with unlimited budgets. This is roughly what hiring in frontier AI looks like now. Euronews has collected five names that Meta, Google, OpenAI and everyone else are hunting for. We tell you the most interesting.
The co-founder of OpenAI and former chief scientist of the company is one of the few people who is trusted unconditionally in the AI industry. Before OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain, where he contributed to fundamental breakthroughs in deep learning. After the crisis with Altman’s removal in 2023, Sutzkever eventually left and founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI).
SSI hasn’t released a single product yet — but it’s already valued at $32 billion. Meta has been trying to buy the company and has been actively poaching its team. And a week ago, in the trial between Musk and OpenAI, Sutzkever confirmed that he has a stake in OpenAI worth $7 billion.
His value is a unique combination of scientific authority, experience with frontier models, and leadership qualities. Such people are rare.
Former CTO of OpenAI, who left the company in 2024. She was behind the public launches of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4 — and became one of the faces of the AI revolution for a wide audience. Before that, she was a senior product manager at Tesla.
After leaving, she founded Thinking Machines Lab. The company has no product, but is valued at over $5 billion and has a team that came from OpenAI, Character.ai, Mistral, and PyTorch. Last week, it showed its first «interaction models» — voice-based, with access to the user’s screen.
Murati’s strategic value lies in her ability to gather top-tier talent around her. In the AI industry, this is a competitive advantage in itself.
Wang started Scale AI back in 2016, a company that makes data labeling and evaluation infrastructure for ML. Simply put, without Scale AI, most large models wouldn’t have learned as well. In 2025, Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, and Wang was given a role at Meta Superintelligence Labs.
According to leaked documents: base salary of $1 million, multi-million dollar bonuses, and $100 to $150 million in equity over five years.
His hobby is not pure science, but understanding how frontier systems are built and scaled in practice. Infrastructure, datasets, evaluation pipelines, operational management — all together. And this is now valued no less than academic regalia.
Founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired back in 2014, when AI seemed like a distant future. Hassabis turned the company into one of the most prestigious AI research centers in the world: AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini. In 2024, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold2, which solved a 50-year-old problem of predicting protein structure.
He currently heads Google DeepMind. His exact salary is not disclosed, but he reportedly received a $3 million bonus for Gemini. His net worth is estimated at around $600 million.
After the release of ChatGPT, Google began to compete much more aggressively for talent — and retaining the DeepMind team became a strategic priority.
Another co-founder of OpenAI. Then the head of AI at Tesla, where he developed neural network systems for autopilot. In 2024 he founded Eureka Labs. There is no valuation of the company, but Karpati’s fortune is somewhere between $50 and $150 million according to previous jobs.
He doesn’t figure in the loudest compensation rumors. But his value lies elsewhere: he shapes opinions within development communities and is able to gather talent around him through his authority in engineering culture. If Ilya Sutzkever is science, then Karpati is inspiration for the next generation of AI engineers.
