[AP]
[AP]

Seven-figure starting packages have become commonplace for twenty-something recruits joining Wall Street quant trading firms and Silicon Valley AI companies, with first-year compensation topping $1 million and occasionally reaching $1.5 million.

Quant firms such as Jane Street and Optiver, along with AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, have driven starting salaries sharply higher as they compete for mathematicians and computer scientists from elite universities, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Matt Stable, chief executive of New York recruiting firm StableSearch, told the Wall Street Journal that seven-figure starting packages were once extraordinary but are no longer surprising. "A few years ago, a seven-figure starting package was unusual — now nobody blinks at $1 million," he said.

He added that the industry divides into a before-and-after OpenAI era. "That's when I saw competition really start to intensify," he said.

The salary surge reflects an overlap in the skills both industries demand. Training large language models and building machine-learning algorithms to predict financial markets both require advanced mathematics and statistics.

[AP]
[AP]

As trading firms have shifted their strategies toward machine learning and AI in recent years, AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic now compete directly with Wall Street for the same thin pool of mathematics graduates and doctoral-level talent.

Bloomberg earlier reported that about 150 quant researchers mingled with Anthropic representatives at a rooftop bar event in New York's Lower East Side in August last year.

OpenAI, Perplexity and others have reportedly offered those quant researchers — specialists in statistics, physics and computer science — compensation packages worth millions of dollars, uncapped equity stakes and access to large-scale computing resources including the latest GPUs.

Business Insider reported last December that the high-compensation race among AI companies had spread to internship and new-graduate programs.

OpenAI pays program participants $18,300 a month. Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI in June last year, while Google reportedly spent $2.4 billion to recruit key personnel from Windsurf.

Companies are also moving to lock in talent early by sponsoring high school math competitions and hosting chess and Rubik's Cube tournaments, with some running programs that invite college students to their headquarters. Academics warn that the lure of high salaries could accelerate a brain drain away from universities and pure research.


dbsdn1110@heraldcorp.com