Meta is offering up to $100 million to lure AI talent, says OpenAI's Sam Altman

Rumor mill: In the escalating race for artificial intelligence dominance, Meta has launched an aggressive recruitment campaign, offering top researchers compensation packages that have stunned the tech world. Led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company is building a new "superintelligence" team and has reportedly offered salaries worth up to $100 million to lure talent from rivals such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

The recruitment drive has a personal element: former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang heads Meta's new AI group, and some new hires are said to be working at desks close to Zuckerberg himself. Last week, Meta finalized a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, signaling the company's commitment to catching up in the AI race.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed these reports directly on a podcast hosted by his brother, Jack Altman. "Meta has started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team," Altman said. "You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that."

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Altman said that he has heard Meta considers OpenAI its biggest competitor, and that he respects Meta's aggressiveness and its continued efforts to try new things. But he described Meta's approach as "crazy." He noted that while his rival has sought to hire "a lot of people" from OpenAI, his employees are motivated by the belief that their company has a better shot at achieving artificial general intelligence and may ultimately become more valuable than Meta.

"There's many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don't think they're a company that's great at innovation," Altman said.

Meta, once known for its prominence in open-source AI development, has experienced employee exits and delayed the release of new open-source AI models that might compete with those from Google, DeepSeek in China, and OpenAI.

Altman added that Meta's focus on massive pay packages rather than on the mission of delivering AGI could undermine the kind of culture needed for true breakthroughs.

Although competitive salaries are essential for hiring in the tech industry, other important factors also play a role. On a March 2024 episode of the "Invest Like The Best" podcast, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said that to attract leading AI talent, companies must not only offer outstanding incentives but also guarantee immediate access to powerful computing resources.

"I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? 'Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'" Srinivas said, referencing the AI chips made by Nvidia.

Meta's efforts have not been entirely fruitless. The company has successfully recruited notable researchers, including Jack Rae from Google DeepMind and Johan Schalkwyk from Sesame AI. However, attempts to poach OpenAI's Noam Brown and Google's Koray Kavukcuoglu were unsuccessful.

Altman's comments reflect the fierce competition for AI talent and the cultural challenges facing companies that rely solely on financial incentives. As Meta continues to invest billions and expand its superintelligence initiative, the question remains whether money can buy the kind of innovation needed to lead the next era of artificial intelligence.