“Higher salaries in AI safety” by Austin Chen

The salaries are too damn low AI safety has a salary overhang. A bunch of people are paid way below their market rate. (Also true of EA, but I’ll lump them under “AI safety” for this piece). This has been getting a bit better, very recently — I hear about eg Redwood Research technical talent making ~800 thousand dollars/y in salary. But when you compare this to the 10 to 100 million dollars/y comp packages for talent in labs, it still seems kind of low. And CG's money cannon has fired very few shots to date — maybe ~15 orgs hit, see Trace — so the raises are still very unequally distributed. It's not just rank-and-file employees, by the way. Even the leadership is grossly underpaid. The numbers I hear range from 150 to 600 thousand dollars/y, for execs at top orgs like METR, MATS, FAR.AI, Constellation. Like, c’mon, I made 250 thousand dollars/y total comp as a undistinguished new grad software engineer in 2016 Google. For the leaders of preeminent safety orgs, surely we can do better than that. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might say that “accepting lower salaries” is a psyop from funders. --- Outline: (00:10) The salaries are too damn low (03:36) ... or are they fine, actually? (05:08) Gigabrained compensation --- First published: November 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HtMvB7XEFThvDLLzT/higher-salaries-in-ai-safety --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.