A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit

Mr. Sutskever was part of a three-researcher team at the University of Toronto that created key so-called computer vision technology. Mr. Goodfellow invented a technique that allows machines to create fake digital photos that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

“When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star,” Mr. Nicholson of the start-up Skymind said. “You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.”

Other researchers at OpenAI, including Greg Brockman, who leads the lab alongside Mr. Sutskever, did not receive such high salaries during the lab’s first year.

In 2016, according to the tax forms, Mr. Brockman, who had served as chief technology officer at the financial technology start-up Stripe, made $175,000. As one of the founders of the organization, however, he most likely took a salary below market value. Two other researchers with more experience in the field — though still very young — made between $275,000 and $300,000 in salary alone in 2016, according to the forms.

Though the pool of available A.I. researchers is growing, it is not growing fast enough. “If anything, demand for that talent is growing faster than the supply of new researchers, because A.I. is moving from early adopters to wider use,” Mr. Nicholson said.

That means it can be hard for companies to hold on to their talent. Last year, after only 11 months at OpenAI, Mr. Goodfellow returned to Google. Mr. Abbeel and two other researchers left the lab to create a robotics start-up, Embodied Intelligence. (Mr. Abbeel has since signed back on as a part-time adviser to OpenAI.) And another researcher, Andrej Karpathy, left to become the head of A.I. at Tesla, which is also building autonomous driving technology.

In essence, Mr. Musk was poaching his own talent. Since then, he has stepped down from the OpenAI board, with the lab saying this would allow him to “eliminate a potential future conflict.”