Meta Platforms Inc. is offering OpenAI employees signing bonuses of $100 million to switch companies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed Tuesday.
“They started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said on the “Uncapped” podcast hosted by his brother Jack. “You know, like $100 million signing bonuses.”
But so far, he said, Meta’s poaching attempts have failed. “None of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said.
Meta had no comment.
The attempted talent raid shouldn’t be surprising. When word leaked that Facebook’s parent company was creating a secretive artificial intelligence (AI) lab to pursue a system that surpasses human intelligence with “superintelligence,” reports buzzed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was spearheading the effort to collect and assemble a so-called “superintelligence group” of 50 top AI researchers and engineers in what amounts to a dramatic restructuring of Meta’s AI efforts.
In a high-priced variation of the axiom, “If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em,” price was no option: In addition to investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI to grab a 49% stake and key executives, Zuck vowed to spend anywhere from seven- to nine-figure salaries on star employees. And, much like a free-spending Major League Baseball franchise in Los Angeles, he is more than willing to splurge.
Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal, reports suggest, is to move beyond broader AI research to a more specialized focus on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and, ultimately, superintelligence. The idea is to weave AGI across Meta’s product suite of chatbots, augmented reality glasses, and other forthcoming projects. Zuckerberg also altered the layout of Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to put the new team near his office, according to reports in the New York Times and Bloomberg.
The concept of a superintelligence lab signals not only a major reorganization but Zuckerberg’s mounting frustration with recent product releases such as Llama 4. Consequently, Meta delayed plans to release its next iteration, called Behemoth, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Altman fed into that narrative during Tuesday’s podcast, saying Meta’s “current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” Altman said. “I think we understand a lot of things they don’t.”
Meta’s apparent aggressive bid for talent comes amid a wave of acquisitions and investments by large tech companies to accrue top-shelf personnel. In recent weeks, Qualcomm Inc. acquired Alphawave for $2.4 billion; Salesforce Inc. bought Informatica Inc. for $8 billion, Convergence.ai for an undisclosed sum, and picked up some of Moonhub’s team; OpenAI scooped up iPhone designer Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup io for about $6.4 billion; and Databricks Inc. said it has agreed to acquire open-source database startup Neon for $1 billion.
