Today, in the intense competition of artificial intelligence, the "war for talent" between big companies has gone beyond senior architects and extended to the recruitment of academic talents. According to a recent report by Business Insider, tech giants are offering astonishing salaries that can match or even exceed many full-time positions in various industries to attract top AI interns and researchers.

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Competition Among Giants: From Hundred-Million Dollar Bonuses to Million-Dollar Salaries

Technology giants are willing to spend heavily to "lock in" talent. In June this year, Meta invested 14.3 billion dollars in Scale AI, seen as a way to indirectly acquire its core team; Google followed closely, acquiring the Windsurf team for 2.4 billion dollars. This competition is clearly reflected in compensation: Meta once offered a signing bonus of up to 1 billion dollars to try to attract employees from OpenAI. Even non-top AI startups have basic annual salaries that have generally reached 300,000 to 400,000 dollars.

Golden Internships: The "Cash Bombing" of Entry-Level Positions

For the next generation of researchers, companies have launched research programs with luxurious salary and resource allocation:

  • Anthropic: Its AI Safety Researcher Program (4 months) offers researchers a weekly allowance of 3,850 dollars (about 27,000 RMB), plus an additional 15,000 dollars monthly computing power budget. Applications for the 2026 summer program will close on January 12th.

  • OpenAI: The Residency Researcher Program (6 months) offers a monthly salary of up to 18,300 dollars (about 129,000 RMB), and those who perform well can be directly converted into full-time positions. Its 2026 recruitment interviews will start next January.

  • Google: Its Student Researcher Program targets PhD students, with a basic annual salary range of 113,000 to 150,000 dollars (about 790,000 to 1,050,000 RMB), directly guided by core teams such as DeepMind.

  • Meta: Its research intern positions offer monthly salaries between 7,650 and 12,000 dollars, covering cutting-edge areas such as neural rendering. At the same time, the application for its Visiting Researcher Program will also close on January 9th next year.

This competition driven by computing power, algorithms, and talent is pushing the entry barriers and premium levels of AI positions to historical peaks.