Elon Musk's AI startup X.AI allegedly pays top dollar

According to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Elon Musk's AI startup X.AI currently pays the highest salaries for AI developers, ahead of even OpenAI. In addition, Elon Musk himself is a selection criterion for many applicants. This makes it difficult for Perplexity to compete with X.AI, says Srinivas. According to Srinivas, it is often the more highly valued companies that attract the best candidates because they can offer higher salaries through stock-based compensation. His strategy is to focus on candidates who are genuinely interested in working for the company. Character.ai also offers high salaries. Anthropic and OpenAI are on par, with OpenAI offering more "standardized compensation." Musk's AI startup has so far produced Grok-1, the AI model behind the X chatbot Grok, which is set to go open source this week. Grok-1 is roughly at or slightly below the level of OpenAI's GPT-3.5.