Jobs and salaries for AI engineer roles are surging

Driving the news: The number of active job posts advertising openings in AI increased 22% in the three-month period ending on Oct. 11 from the prior three months, according to data from Comprehensive.io, the company co-founded by Roger Lee, who started layoffs.fyi.

• Comprehensive pulls its data directly from company job postings — and looks at the salary ranges that some state laws now require employers to include.
• For this report, they focused on AI engineering jobs, finding that they paid about 20% more than non-AI software engineer roles.
• This is the first time Comprehensive calculated the AI premium, but Lee says that he's noticed, just from looking at the data this year, that the premium has grown wider over the past six months or so.
• Wages for other tech roles have been mostly "stagnant," he said.

Zoom out: The rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022 kicked off an AI boom that's changed the tech industry and led to surging demand for workers with these skills.

• "We're seeing a 21-times increase in job postings," LinkedIn's chief economist told Axios' Ryan Heath in August.

• Workers are responding to the boom themselves by adding more AI-related keywords to their profiles.

The other side: AI is also driving job losses, said Lee, pointing to cuts at Chegg, an online learning platform that said ChatGPT was hurting its business. Other companies have cut jobs to become leaner and more efficient — saying that AI would help with that.

• Part of the Biden administration's executive order on AI — out Monday —  includes a directive to look at the technology's "labor market impacts," including job loss.

The bottom line: AI giveth, AI taketh.