A secretive AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is turning heads across Silicon Valley—and not just for its stealthy product pipeline. The company, Thinking Machines Lab, is reportedly paying base salaries of up to $500,000 to top AI researchers, many of whom are in the U.S. on H-1B visas.
The revelation underscores the intensifying global AI talent war, with companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic fiercely competing for limited high-skilled machine learning talent.
$500K Base Salaries, Before Bonuses or Equity
According to Business Insider, Thinking Machines Lab compensates its leading technical talent at the highest level of pay, with $500,000 as a base salary for the lead AI engineer, and at least three others (including a co-founder) at $450,000 each, based on H-1B requirements. The H-1B pay, however, will only reflect the base pay, and does not add on signing bonuses or equity grants, which would add quite a bit more on top of their salary.
We all learned about the salary packages through H-1B filings that were submitted for each of the foreign employees, with U.S. businesses needing to file an H-1B visa when employing international talent. The public disclosure of H-1B filings provides insight into how aggressively AI Startups like Thinking Machines Lab are competing to hire the top-level engineers in a tightly competitive talent market..
A Global Talent Hunt on US Soil
What’s notable is that all these highly paid employees are working on H-1B visas, highlighting the continued dependence on international talent in cutting-edge tech roles, even amid immigration scrutiny in the U.S.
While tech layoffs have dominated headlines in some sectors, AI talent remains in extremely high demand, especially for foundational model research, reinforcement learning, and applied generative AI.
Thinking Machines Lab
Launched in February 2025 by Mira Murati, who served as OpenAI’s CTO until early this year, Thinking Machines Lab has kept its product plans tightly under wraps. But the startup already made waves when it raised $2 billion in seed funding, valuing the company at $10 billion, despite being only months old.
While the company has yet to publicly launch a product, insiders suggest it is working on next-generation AI models focused on autonomous reasoning and decision-making.
AI Compensation Reaches Stratospheric Levels
Thinking Machines Lab isn’t alone in offering jaw-dropping compensation. OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently claimed Meta has dangled signing bonuses as high as $100 million to lure top researchers. Though Meta denies such figures, the talent war is real, at least eight OpenAI staffers have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. AI researchers have become some of the highest-paid professionals in tech, often surpassing even veteran executives in other industries.
Conclusion
As AI becomes central to future computing, national security, and economic growth, the race to secure top talent is only accelerating. With players like Thinking Machines Lab entering the battlefield with deep funding and sky-high compensation, the AI arms race in 2025 is no longer about who has the best model, it’s about who can hire and retain the minds behind them.
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