Meta Platforms has tried to lure top OpenAI talent with signing bonuses reaching $100 million and promises of even more generous annual compensation, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said on the “Uncapped” podcast released Tuesday.
“You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year.”
Despite the aggressive recruitment efforts, Altman noted that “at least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
The Post has sought comment from Meta and OpenAI.
Altman framed the poaching attempts as part of a broader and intensifying battle for elite AI talent, likening the current climate to the free-agent frenzy of professional sports.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” he said.
“Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
The comments come at a pivotal moment in Meta’s artificial intelligence strategy. The company recently invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired the startup’s founder, Alexandr Wang, to head up a new “superintelligence” division.
The much-ballyhooed “acquihire” deal included a 49% stake in Scale AI and saw a handful of Wang’s colleagues follow him to Meta.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly taken a personal interest in accelerating the company’s AI capabilities.
According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg has directly participated in high-profile recruitment, including the recent hiring of Jack Rae, a leading researcher from DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab.
Altman, however, questioned whether throwing large sums of money at individuals creates the right environment for innovation.
“I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying ‘We’re just going to try to copy OpenAI,’” he said.
“That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate.”
Meta has historically championed open-source AI, particularly with its Llama series of large language models. Yet the company has faced setbacks.
The release of its newest flagship AI model was delayed amid internal concerns about its readiness, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Zuckerberg’s deep investment in AI infrastructure, however, has not gone unnoticed. Some industry observers argue that Meta is still playing a critical role in shaping the field.
“They basically built the rails for open source AI development, and so much of what is happening in AI is being built on Meta,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, during an appearance on CNBC’s Power Lunch on Tuesday.
Meta’s open-source approach has enabled a wide range of third-party developers to build applications on top of its models. Proponents argue this could ultimately offer a counterbalance to the more closed strategies of rivals like OpenAI.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has been active on the M&A front as well. Last month, the company completed a $6.4 billion all-equity acquisition of io, a startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Ive has since joined OpenAI, bringing with him a design-forward approach to AI hardware and interfaces.
