One million a year salary? Here's top AI talent firms are bidding for

EuroNews · 🇫🇷 public France · May 19, 2026 · 1398 words · By Quirino Mealha

Concentration of Power in AI Executive Compensation AI Talent War

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What to know about Concentration of Power in AI

As Big Tech and a whole cohort of new-generation AI start-ups race towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), elite researchers and engineering leaders have become the equivalent of franchise athletes.

Claims checked 26

Techniques found 2

Topics 3

Coverage spectrum

Coverage gap: Low Right coverage

Left14%

Center86%

Right0%

7 sources compared across this story cluster. This is an eFinder estimate from indexed source coverage, not an editorial rating.

What happened

Why it matters

The emerging AI industry has created a labour market unlike anything Silicon Valley has seen since the dot-com boom, except this time, there are perhaps only a few hundred people currently capable of building frontier AI systems at scale.

Common ground

OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and a new and growing number of AI start-ups are all competing to attract an incredibly small pool of highly skilled talent.

Perspective signals

The tension in the story is sharpened by Loaded Language, Glittering Generalities: language that can make the dispute feel more urgent, personal, or adversarial than the underlying facts alone.

Follow-up questions

What new context would change how readers understand this Concentration of Power in AI story?
What evidence would most clearly confirm or weaken the claim that In 2024, the AlphaFold2 model solved a 50-year-old challenge by accurately predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins which led to Hassabis being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry?
How does this story connect Concentration of Power in AI with Executive Compensation over the next few days?

open_in_new Read the original article: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/05/19/ai-bidding-wars-the-talent-making-a…

psychologyPropaganda Techniques Detected

eFinder identified 2 propaganda techniques in this article. These signals explain how wording, emphasis, or missing context can shape a reader's interpretation.

warning

Loaded Language 80% confidence

Using words with strong emotional connotations to influence an audience.

Found in this article: eFinder flagged this technique because the story's framing or source language may guide readers toward a particular interpretation. Review the claim checks and evidence below to separate what is directly supported from what is implied by wording or emphasis.

Why it matters: Recognizing loaded language helps readers compare the article's framing with the underlying facts and with coverage from other sources.

warning

Glittering Generalities 70% confidence

Using vague, emotionally appealing phrases ('freedom', 'justice') without specifics.

Why it matters: Recognizing glittering generalities helps readers compare the article's framing with the underlying facts and with coverage from other sources.

fact_checkClaims Checked

eFinder analyzed this article and checked 26 claims against available evidence, cross-references, web search, and Wikipedia. Here is what the fact-checking layer found.

schedule Pending 16

check_circle Corroborated 4

verified Verified By Reference 3

help Insufficient Evidence 2

info Single Source 1

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Claim 1: “In 2024, the AlphaFold2 model solved a 50-year-old challenge by accurately predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins which led to Hassabis being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

verified

Claim 2: “Before OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain, which was the precursor to Google DeepMind”

VERIFIED BY REFERENCE

Wikipedia and professional bios confirm Sutskever worked at Google Brain prior to co-founding OpenAI.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Ilya Sutskever (Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; born 1986) is a computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning, including sequence-…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in San Francisco, consisting of a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC) partially controlled by a nonprofit…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

+ 3 more evidence sources

info

Claim 3: “It was later reported that Meta explored acquisition talks involving SSI and aggressively attempted to recruit talent associated with the company during Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring push in 2025.”

SINGLE SOURCE

The provided evidence for Meta consists of general company descriptions and does not mention acquisition talks or recruitment pushes specifically targeting SSI in 2025.

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web search NEUTRAL — Meta Platforms, Inc. (doing business as Meta) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms a…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms

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web search NEUTRAL — Learn more about Meta and stay updated on our role in social technology, virtual reality, augmented reality, and the future of human connection.
https://www.meta.com/about/

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web search NEUTRAL — By logging in, you can navigate to all business tools like Meta Business Suite, Ads Manager and more to help you connect with your customers and get better business results.
https://business.facebook.com/

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Claim 4: “In 2025, Meta reportedly acquired a 49% non-voting stake in the firm [Scale AI] for $14.3 billion (€12.3bn) valuing it at $29 billion (€25bn).”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

verified

Claim 5: “Following OpenAI’s dramatic 2023 governance crisis involving Sam Altman’s temporary removal as CEO, Sutskever eventually departed the company and co-founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) in 2024.”

VERIFIED BY REFERENCE

Wikipedia and multiple news sources confirm Sutskever left OpenAI following the 2023 governance crisis and co-founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) in 2024.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI Inc.) is an Israeli-American artificial intelligence company founded by Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI; Daniel Gross, former head of Apple’s AI e…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Superintelligence_Inc.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence surpassing that of the most gifted human minds. Philosopher Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as "any intellect that greatl…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence

+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 6: “Alleged document leaks suggest his compensation is among the largest in Silicon Valley history with a $1 million (€860,000) base salary, multi-million-dollar bonuses and $100 million (€86m) to $150 million (€129m) in equity vesting over five years.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

help

Claim 7: “Another major talent to leave OpenAI was former chief technology officer Mira Murati, who quit the company in 2024.”

INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

No evidence was provided in the search results regarding Mira Murati's departure from OpenAI in 2024.

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Claim 8: “president Greg Brockman testified to holding a near $30 billion (€25.8bn) stake [in OpenAI].”

CORROBORATED

Multiple independent sources, including WIRED and AP Photo references, report Greg Brockman testified to a stake worth nearly $30 billion.

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web search NEUTRAL — Greg Brockman Testifies Stake In OpenAI Worth Nearly $30 Billion—Despite Investing Nothing.Open AI President Discloses His Stake in the Company is Worth $30 Billion. 6 hours ago.
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqNggKIjBDQklTSGpvSmMzUnZj…

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web search NEUTRAL — Greg Brockman Testifies Stake In OpenAI Worth Nearly $30 Billion—Despite Investing Nothing.Sam Altman, right, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, center, arrive at the U.S. District Court in Oakland, …
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/05/04/greg-broc…

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web search NEUTRAL — Brockman revealed that his equity stake at OpenAI is currently worth more than $20 billion, and perhaps up to $30 billion. While Brockman initially promised to donate $100,000 to OpenAI when it was be…
https://www.wired.com/story/greg-brockman-testifies-musk-v-a…

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Claim 9: “Sutskever also confirmed holding a $7 billion (€6bn) stake in OpenAI during his testimony for the high-stakes trial between Elon Musk and the ChatGPT creator”

CORROBORATED

Multiple independent web sources report that Ilya Sutskever testified that his stake in OpenAI is worth approximately $7 billion.

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web search NEUTRAL — Ilya Sutskever Says His OpenAI Stake is Worth About $7 billion.Ex-OpenAI exec Sutskever says he spent a year gathering proof of alleged Altman dishonesty.
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqNggKIjBDQklTSGpvSmMzUnZj…

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web search NEUTRAL — Brockman testified his nearly $30 billion stake in the ChatGPT last week. Forbes estimates Altman’s net worth is around $3.5 billion. As of Monday, Musk, the richest man in the world, has a $827 billi…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/05/11/ilya-suts…

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web search NEUTRAL — OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said his stake in the ChatGPT maker is worth roughly $7 billion, making him one of the largest individual shareholders in the artificial int…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-11/sutskever…

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Claim 10: “Wang launched Scale AI all the way back in 2016”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 11: “DeepMind was originally founded in London and acquired by Google in 2014”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 12: “After leaving OpenAI, Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

verified

Claim 13: “Ilya Sutskever... As a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, Sutskever helped drive breakthroughs behind GPT models”

VERIFIED BY REFERENCE

Wikipedia and multiple web sources confirm Ilya Sutskever is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI who contributed to GPT models.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a large language model developed by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. GPT-4 is preceded by GPT-3.5 and followed by its suc…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — A generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) is a type of large language model (LLM) that is widely used in generative artificial intelligence chatbots. GPTs are based on a deep learning architecture ca…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo…

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+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 14: “He has reportedly earned specific performance rewards such as a significant $3 million (€2.58m) bonus for his achievements with the Gemini AI project.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

schedule

Claim 15: “Alexandr Wang was brought into a leadership role within Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI division of Mark Zuckerberg's company.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

schedule

Claim 16: “the firm [Thinking Machines Lab]... reportedly achieved a valuation exceeding $5 billion (€4.3bn) shortly after launch.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 17: “OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and a new and growing number of AI start-ups are all competing to attract an incredibly small pool of highly skilled talent.”

CORROBORATED

Multiple web search results explicitly list OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence as competitors fighting for a limited/small pool of AI talent.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — An AI boom is a period of rapid growth in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The most recent boom happened in the early 2020s before seeing increased acceleration and media coverage. Examples …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_boom

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models (LLMs) developed by Google DeepMind, and the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2. Comprising Gemini Pro, Gemini Deep Think, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Fl…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(language_model)

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Google DeepMind, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK i…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind

+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 18: “She also previously worked as a senior product manager at Tesla.”

INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

No evidence was provided in the search results regarding Mira Murati's employment history at Tesla.

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Claim 19: “Karpathy's net worth is estimated to be between $50 million (€43m) and $150 million (€129m) due to his previous jobs.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 20: “Demis Hassabis... spent years building DeepMind into one of the world’s premier AI research organisations which became famous for breakthroughs including AlphaGo... and AlphaFold”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 21: “Hassabis' estimated net worth is approximately $600 million (€516m).”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 22: “SSI... was privately valued at around $32 billion (€27.5bn) in 2025.”

CORROBORATED

Multiple web sources, including a reference to the Financial Times, report that SSI raised funding at a $32 billion valuation.

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web search NEUTRAL — Safe Superintelligence Inc. is an Israeli-American artificial intelligence company founded by Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI; Daniel Gross, former head of Apple’s AI efforts; and…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Superintelligence_Inc.

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web search NEUTRAL — Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup led by OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised an additional $2 billion in funding at a $32 billion valuation, according …
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sut…

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web search NEUTRAL — SSI last raised $1bn at a $5bn valuation in September. SSI has set out to create AI models that are dramatically more powerful and more intelligent than current cutting-edge models from rivals such as…
https://www.ft.com/content/792e09b2-f63b-41ac-8be8-e10e75ead…

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Claim 23: “the Slovak-Canadian computer researcher moved on to become head of AI at Tesla where he helped lead the development of neural-network-based autonomous driving systems from 2017 to 2022.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 24: “Andrej Karpathy rounds off the list as another co-founder of OpenAI.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 25: “Karpathy later returned briefly to OpenAI before launching Eureka Labs in 2024.”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

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Claim 26: “reports indicate it [DeepMind] was bought for anywhere between $400 million (€344m) and $650 million (€559m)”

PENDING

This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.

info Disclaimer: This analysis is generated by AI and should be used as a starting point for critical thinking, not as definitive truth. Claims are verified against publicly available sources. Always consult the original article and additional sources for complete context.