OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta tried to poach his staff with jaw-dropping bonus and compensation enticements.
“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in comp per year,” Altman said on the UnCapped podcast, hosted by his brother Jack.
“It is crazy,” he added. “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
The claim comes as Zuckerberg does appear willing to pump billions into improving his social media company Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and its standing in the world of artificial intelligence.
Zuckerberg tempted Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to join Meta with a deal worth around $14 billion, according to CNBC. Meta also lured Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google’s AI lab DeepMind, to join the company, Bloomberg reported.
Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment push is fueled by frustration over Meta falling behind tech giants like Google and OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, in the AI race, along with the lackluster reception to Meta’s current AI model, Llama 4.
Meta is also delaying the rollout of its Behemoth AI model due to concerns about its performance and its improvements over Llama, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Speaking on UnCapped, Altman suggested that Zuckerberg throwing money at his problems may not be enough to sway top AI talent.
“I think people sort of look at the two paths and say OpenAI’s a really good shot—a much better shot, actually—at delivering on superintelligence, and also may eventually be the more valuable company,” Altman said.
“But I think the strategy of a ton of upfront, guaranteed comp—and that being the reason you tell someone to join, really the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work or the mission—I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,“ he added. ”I hope we can be the best place in the world to do this kind of research.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
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