The day before the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman surprised employees with a message in the company's Slack.
"As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market," wrote Altman, according to a copy of the message that was shared with me. He announced that OpenAI would give a "special one-time award" to researchers and software engineers in a handful of orgs, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety.
"We very much intend to keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company," he wrote. "But we wanted to be transparent about this one since …
