One of the scariest jobs to have right now could be yours for $555k a year

Remember when we were all in school, and teachers would warn us that all the jobs we'd eventually end up doing hadn't even been invented yet?

Well, they were right, as one of the scariest and most 'stressful' jobs to have right now could be yours for a staggering $555k a year.

OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence organisation headquartered in San Francisco and best known for ChatGPT, is offering the hefty yearly salary for its 'Head of Preparedness' role.

OpenAI's job listing in the 'about the role' segment explains: "As the Head of Preparedness, you will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI’s Preparedness framework, our framework explaining OpenAI’s approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm.

"You will be the directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations that form a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline."

Such a role requires deep technical judgment, clear communication, and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains, according to the job ad.

"You will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework," it adds.

In short, the 'Head of Preparedness' at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons.

"This will be a stressful job, and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately," said CEO Sam Altman, as he launched the hunt to fill 'a critical role' to 'help the world'.

Taking to X to advertise the role, Altman urged: "We have a strong foundation of measuring growing capabilities, but we are entering a world where we need more nuanced understanding and measurement of how those capabilities could be abused, and how we can limit those downsides both in our products and in the world, in a way that lets us all enjoy the tremendous benefits.

"These questions are hard, and there is little precedent."

I guess that explains the over half-a-million dollar paycheck to go with it!

He added: "If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting-edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can't use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying."

Oh yeah, and on top of the already massive salary is an unspecified amount of equity in OpenAI, a company that has been valued at an even more eye-watering $500 billion.