According to OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offered senior OpenAI employees signing bonuses of up to $100 million along with even larger annual compensation packages, to lure away top AI talent from the ChatGPT developer.
CNBC reports that the battle for top AI talent is heating up, with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reportedly trying to poach senior OpenAI employees by offering them massive signing bonuses and lucrative compensation packages.
Breitbart News previously reported on Meta’s “superintelligence” team, which Zuckerberg is personally handpicking an all-star team of AI talent to spearhead.
Speaking on the Uncapped podcast hosted by his brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta had attempted to hire “a lot of people” from his company, offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, along with even larger annual compensation packages. However, Altman claimed that “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
Altman also noted that Meta views OpenAI as its biggest competitor, acknowledging that the social media giant’s current AI efforts have not yielded the desired results. “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.”
Meta’s aggressive recruiting tactics come amid reports that the company has once again delayed the release of its latest flagship AI model due to concerns about its capabilities. Sources have previously told CNBC that Zuckerberg is willing to invest billions in top talent to bolster Meta’s standing in the AI race.
Last week, Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, announced his departure to join Meta as part of a $14.3 billion deal that saw the Facebook parent acquire a 49 percent stake in the AI startup. A small number of Scale AI employees will also join Meta as part of the agreement. Wang is expected to head a research lab pursuing an AI system that surpasses human intelligence.
Meta has also recently poached other top talent, including Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, with Zuckerberg reportedly directly involved in the recruitment efforts.
Altman criticized Meta’s strategy of offering large, upfront, guaranteed compensation, arguing that it would detract from the actual work and fail to foster a winning culture. “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 added. “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.”
However, some tech analysts have pushed back against the notion that Meta has been missing the mark on AI. Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum Group, told CNBC’s Power Lunch that Meta “basically built the rails for open source AI development, and so much of what is happening in AI is being built on Meta.” He added that Meta’s massive investments, such as in ScaleAI, will continue to push it forward in training its behemoth models.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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