Before we put AI out of work, AI jobs can pay well.

Amidst the growing technological revolution, AI-related jobs are increasing in number and offering higher salaries.

According to a recent study from BizReport, AI roles are offering 77.53% higher salaries than other professions, indicating that it is the beginning of a lucrative period for people with AI skills.

This increase in compensation—documented in “The Impact of AI on US Workforce Wages”—isn't limited to skilled tech domains. A new role has emerged in digital demand advertising: rapid engineering, a highly profitable venture that surprisingly requires no engineering. These positions are attracting salaries of up to $449,000 per year, and welcome individuals with a basic understanding of programming and AI models.

Former Tesla and current OpenAI developer Andrei Karpati hailed natural communication over programming as a new way of interacting with computers.

“The hottest new programming language is English,” he said in a tweet posted on his Twitter profile.

The financial need for AI operations is undeniable. For engineers specifically, data from the ZIP Labor Report shows that the average salary is $62,977 a year, with top earners earning up to $95,500 a year. High-paying cities like Berkeley, California can see fast engineering salaries of up to $80,745.

Bizreport “collected data from the eight most popular job posting platforms in 2023” and then used keyword research to categorize and analyze AI-related job offers. “In the one-year period from 2022 to 2023, computer science salaries in the United States will increase significantly, with an impressive average increase of 45.87%,” the study concluded.

Things get better at the entry level, earning 128.23% more than their non-AI counterparts. The gap begins to narrow for jobs that require more experience, with top jobs paying an average of 48.61% more.

At the forefront of this lucrative space, the art of developing compelling incentives for AI is described by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as “an incredibly high-level skill and the first example of programming in a small amount of natural language.”

The idea is that individuals like Mark, a technical writer and YouTuber, have shared with Decrypt how profitable it is to take some time to sell quizzes on the internet. “There are people who are on their way to making $100,000 this year from the sale,” he said.

But the field competition has increased. According to data from LinkedIn, which is owned by OpenAI investor Microsoft, “job postings that mention artificial intelligence or generative AI have seen 17% higher application growth over the past two years than job postings that have no mention at all.

Erin Scruggs, LinkedIn's VP of Global Talent Acquisition, commended companies for building the right AI strategy to “track the market.”

BizReport's findings support LinkedIn's.

“We estimate that there will be 131,000 AI-related jobs for the computer science market by 2024. This high number reflects the rapid growth and demand for AI skills in the job market,” the study says.

Unlike traditional computer science-based coding jobs, agile engineering is now being targeted at non-traditional backgrounds. Anna Bernstein, rapid engineer at Copy.ai, told Time magazine, “I didn't have any technology background, but I think it's a win to have a humanistic background in this field.”

In particular, rapid engineering has led to the proliferation of “rapid hacking” as a role where autonomous rapid engineers use their expertise to push AI models beyond their limits. From generating nudity or NSFW responses to revealing sensitive information, this route can be hilarious or dangerously lucrative, depending on who gets taken down.

So, it's clear that AI may one day automate many (or all) of our jobs, but right now it's offering some of the most lucrative positions in the workforce. With such impressive pay and accessible entryways, AI seems to be creating even better jobs than it is taking — at least for now. After all, the joke may be on the robots.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.