OpenAI’s CEO has accused Meta of attempting to lure personnel with pay packages surpassing $100 million.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that tech rival Meta is aggressively attempting to attract members of his team with jaw-dropping offers, including signing bonuses of up to $100 million.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has increased its investment in artificial intelligence, recently buying a 49% share in the startup Scale AI for $14 billion. Despite the generous incentives, Altman stated that, “at least so far,” none of his top executives had accepted the offers.
On his brother Jack Altman’s podcast, Altman showed admiration for Meta’s strong rivalry while questioning its innovation credentials. “There are many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s, like, great at innovation,” he told me.
Altman stated that, in addition to signing bonuses, Meta was offering even greater yearly compensation packages, though he did not specify whether these were in the form of salaries, stock options, or other incentives. Nonetheless, he believes OpenAI employees are staying because of the company’s distinct culture and mission to create superintelligent AI capable of outperforming human talents.
“Our people stay because of the really special culture and the mission—creating superintelligence and the economic rewards and everything else flowing from that,” he told CNN.
The fierce bidding war for AI expertise underscores the growing confidence in the IT industry that exceptional researchers and engineers will decide the outcome of the AI race. According to Indranil Bandyopadhyay, a principal analyst at Forrester, the large offers are part of a “high-risk, high-reward gamble,” with talent now seen as “the most precious and fiercely contested resource” in the market.
“Whether this intense level of investment is sustainable remains to be seen, but for now, the AI gold rush continues at a breakneck pace,” says Bandyopadhyay.
Big IT companies are investing billions to keep ahead in the AI arms race. OpenAI, for example, said in January that it had joined other funders in pledging $500 billion to create advanced data centers in the United States to help future AI development.
Meta has yet to respond to Altman’s remarks.