At an ex-OpenAI researcher's influential lab, $500,000 salaries aren't enough to fix a talent 'bottleneck'. METR's CEO, Beth Barnes, who left OpenAI to start the nonprofit METR in 2022, fears the industry lacks the staff to keep up with AI's next chapter. METR, which stands for Model Evaluation and Threat Research, works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta to provide independent answers about the tech's capabilities. Barnes sees fierce competition for AI researchers, and even METR's salaries, which reach $503,000 on current job postings, don't address the talent shortage. "Ideally, we'd like to scale really large, but in practice, we've been able to fundraise as much as we need, and the bottleneck is much more talent," Barnes said. More than 1,300 frontier lab employees signed a letter in July warning that AI development could outpace control. Inside the 35-person lab, the feeling is one of concern. When Business Insider visited METR's Berkeley office on the afternoon that OpenAI revealed its hack, Barnes described an AI safety field badly constrained by its size. "There's so much more to do than we have capacity for," Barnes said. METR measures the likelihood that AI models can complete tasks of increasing duration, forming a widely-cited chart showing capabilities have doubled about every seven months over the last six years. Chris Painter, METR's president,