Sam Altman Claims Meta Offered $100 Million Bonuses To OpenAI Employees

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that Meta has offered bonuses as high as $100 million in attempts to recruit key employees from his company. Speaking on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, the CEO confirmed the offers were ultimately unsuccessful, attributing staff loyalty to their belief in OpenAI's path towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Altman stated, "Meta has started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team. 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." This recruitment effort for the superintelligence team follows Meta's recent $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of its CEO, Alexander Wang, to lead Meta's new team.

The company also acquired several top AI researchers, including Google DeepMind's Jack Rae and Sesame AI's John Schalkwyk. In its bid to compete with rival companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, Meta has reportedly attempted to recruit other high-profile AI researchers, such as OpenAI's Noam Brown and Google's AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, though it has been unsuccessful.

Altman criticised Meta's approach, suggesting that the company prioritised talent acquisition over innovation. He emphasised that innovation remains central to OpenAI's mission. Looking ahead, OpenAI plans to launch a new open-source AI model and develop a social media platform designed to deliver content based on user needs, rather than algorithmic-driven feeds.