# Levels.fyi tells LDS the AI pay premium has stopped growing > Source: > Published: 2026-08-26 15:14:50+00:00 Levels.fyi prepared a compensation analysis for Lets Data Science from its US salary submissions, and the findings cut against the prevailing story. The median AI premium is real but has stopped growing: an L3 ML/AI engineer earned about 1.34 times a non-AI peer in late 2024 and about 1.29 times by mid 2026. ML engineers have held a stable gap of roughly 40 percent over data scientists for two years, with no convergence. What is growing is concentration: the 90th-percentile-to-median ratio for ML/AI engineers widened from 2.06 to 2.23 while the broad software population barely moved, and the extreme numbers are employer effects. The median recruiter at OpenAI earns about 580,000 dollars on a sample of seven, which Levels.fyi flags as directional, against 155,000 dollars in the broad market.