Sam Altman says Meta tried and failed to poach OpenAI’s talent with $100M offers
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 challenges that Meta has to overcome in order to build out a successful AI superintelligence lab. Besides bringing on Wang, Meta announced last week that it invested significantly in Wang’s former company, Scale AI. The company has also reportedly nabbed a few star AI researchers, such as Google DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Sesame AI’s Johan Schalkwyk. But there’s more work ahead.
In the coming year, Meta will have to staff up its new AI team while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind operate at full speed. In the coming months, OpenAI is expected to release an open AI model that’s likely to set Meta back in the AI race even further.
Later on in the podcast, Sam Altman described an AI-powered social media feed that seems likely to encroach on Meta’s apps. The OpenAI CEO said he’s curious about exploring a social media app that uses AI to deliver custom feeds based on what users want, rather than the default, algorithmic feed that exists on traditional social media apps.
OpenAI is reportedly working on a social networking app internally. Meanwhile, Meta is experimenting with an AI-powered social network through its Meta AI app. However, it seems that some users are confused by the Meta AI app and have shared some hyperpersonal chats with the broader world.
Whether AI-powered social networks take off remains to be seen. In the meantime, Zuckerberg and Sam Altman seem poised to butt heads over the AI talent race.
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene.
