Don’t expect to see Sam Altman lamenting the absence of “masculine energy” in corporate America to Joe Rogan anytime soon.
The OpenAI CEO sent employees a message on Slack criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and appears to have taken the opportunity to also take a subtle jab at his rival, Mark Zuckerberg.
The reference can be found where Altman wrote that OpenAI aims to “not get blown around by changing fashions.”
“We didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular,” Altman told employees.
Last year, Zuckerberg championed a return to masculinity at Meta on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
“The masculine energy, I think, is good,” Zuckerberg said in the January podcast episode. “Society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was trying to get away from it.”
Zuckerberg described the merits of a corporate culture that “celebrates the aggression” of business.
The Meta CEO said that the intent of corporate culture’s shift away from masculinity was good. Women likely feel that companies are “too masculine,” he told Rogan, and that things are “biased” against them. But the shift had gone too far, the Facebook cofounder said.
“It’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s another to basically say that masculinity is bad.”
Altman also wrote in his memo that OpenAI didn’t “become super woke when that was popular.”
Meta didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on Altman’s remark.
The latest in an AI rivalry
Altman and Zuckerberg are currently engaged in a talent war for top AI researchers and engineers.
Zuckerberg has attempted to poach OpenAI employees with eye-popping compensation packages, which Altman in June said included $100 million signing bonuses.
While Altman at the time said that he was happy that “at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Zuckerberg successfully hired away some prominent OpenAI talent.
The Meta CEO, who even hand-delivered soup to an OpenAI employee he was attempting to poach, hired away ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao and three researchers who helped build OpenAI’s Zurich office.
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