Sam Altman says Meta tried and failed to poach OpenAI’s talent with $100M offers

Summary

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on something of a hiring spree lately, trying to staff up Meta’s new superintelligence team with top-tier AI researchers from competing labs. To work on a team led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and at a desk physically near Zuckerberg, Meta has reportedly offered employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed those reports on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, which was published on Tuesday. However, the OpenAI CEO noted that Zuckerberg’s recruiting efforts have been largely unsuccessful and made sure to throw a few more digs at Meta in the process. “[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman said on the podcast. “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.” The OpenAI CEO said he believed his employees made the assessment that OpenAI had a better chance of achieving AGI and may one day be the more valuable company. He also said he believes Meta’s focus on high compensation packages for employees, rather than the mission of delivering AGI, would likely not create a great culture. Meta reportedly tried to poach one of OpenAI’s lead researchers, Noam Brown, as well as Google’s AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu. However, both efforts were unsuccessful. Sam Altman went on to say he believes OpenAI’s culture of innovation has been a major key to its success, and that Meta’s “current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped.” The OpenAI CEO said he respects many things about Meta but noted he doesn’t “think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.” Later in the podcast, Altman said he believes it’s not enough for companies to catch up on AI — they have to truly innovate to stay ahead. The OpenAI CEO’s comments highlight some of the challe...