Sam Altman alleges Mark Zuckerberg is offering $100 million to lure OpenAI talent
Sam Altman claimed Meta's compensation-first pitch, including signing bonuses reaching nine figures, lacked the deeper pull that mission-driven employees at OpenAI are seeking.
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In Silicon Valley's escalating AI arms race, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is putting his money where the machine is.
Zuckerberg is offering compensation packages reportedly exceeding $100 million to lure top researchers from rival AI powerhouses like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. But according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the eye-watering offers aren't working.
Speaking on a podcast hosted by his brother Jack Altman, the OpenAI chief addressed recent reports of Meta's aggressive poaching strategy. "They've started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team," Altman confirmed. "I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that."
Altman claimed Meta's compensation-first pitch, including signing bonuses reaching nine figures, lacked the deeper pull that mission-driven employees at OpenAI are seeking.
While Meta has failed to recruit key names like OpenAI's Noam Brown and DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu, it has landed others including Jack Rae (formerly of DeepMind) and Johan Schalkwyk from Sesame AI.
The company has also partnered closely with Scale AI - where former CEO Alexandr Wang is now leading Meta's new "superintelligence" team. Researchers on his team reportedly work in direct proximity to Zuckerberg himself, underscoring how high the stakes are in Meta's AGI (artificial general intelligence) ambitions.
Zuckerberg's play to fast-track Meta into the heart of the AGI conversation follows years of the company trailing behind OpenAI and Google in major AI breakthroughs.
Meta's past AI models - including Llama - have been open-sourced and praised in parts of the AI research community, but have yet to spark the same level of global attention as ChatGPT or Gemini.
"Meta's current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped," Altman said. "It's not enough to catch up - you have to actually innovate."
