How much is OpenAI prepared to spend to hold on to its talent?

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
3 min readOct 5, 2024

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IMAGE: An illustration symbolizing brain drain at a corporation, with several brains escaping from a large building

OpenAI’s lavish $6.6 billion financing round, which now puts the value of the company at no less than $157 billion, temporarily allows it to cover a problem all the companies working on AI face, what we might call talent drain.

In fact, everything seems to indicate that a good part of the billions of dollars raised in the largest financing round of all times are going to be directed to a purpose that will raise its new investors’ hackles: buying back the shares of employees who have been partially paid for with stock options, many of whom will be keen to cash in their chips and enjoy the good life.

It’s a complicated matter: on the one hand, as we have already seen, working at OpenAI or any other AI company these days means being able to enter the industry of your choice and demand astronomical salaries for designing and putting into practice what you know how to do. That said, it takes a very large range of skills to launch a successful AI initiative and many of the variables involved are not even in the hands or under the control of the entrepreneurs involved, who are typically experts in only a certain subset of those skills. Nevertheless few will complain about their professional expectations if they are working in this field today.

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)