Meta offered OpenAI employees $100 million each, but to no avail - Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that Meta offered key OpenAI specialists compensation in excess of $100 million, but these attempts were unsuccessful. This is reported by UNN with reference to TechCrunch.

Details

According to Altman, Meta is actively trying to assemble a team to develop superintelligence by poaching leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. In particular, employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind received offers – we are talking about signing bonuses and annual packages for tens of millions of dollars. The team at Meta is headed by former Scale AI head Alexander Wang.

Meta started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team. Well, you know, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that amount (in the form of, – ed.) annual compensation. I am very glad that, at least for now, none of our best people have decided to agree with him

He also expressed his belief that the company's values played a key role in employees' decisions.

I think they think we have a better chance of achieving AGI and maybe one day becoming a more valuable company. I think Meta's focus on high compensation rather than mission is unlikely to lead to a good culture

He also commented on Meta's failures in poaching artificial intelligence researchers:

Meta's current efforts in artificial intelligence have not worked as well as hoped. I respect Meta in many ways, but I don't think they are a company that is great at innovation

In his opinion, it is not enough to just "catch up" with artificial intelligence – it is necessary to generate breakthroughs:

It's not enough for companies to just catch up with AI – they need to truly innovate to stay ahead

Additionally

In particular, Meta tried to poach OpenAI's leading researcher Noam Brown and Google's AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu, but to no avail. In addition, Jack Ray from Google DeepMind and Johan Schalkwijk from Sesame AI were successfully recruited to the Meta team.

In 2025, Meta is to complete the formation of a new AI team. At this time, competitors – OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic – are already demonstrating progress. It is expected that OpenAI will present an open AI model in the near future, which may further distance Meta from the industry leaders.

In the podcast, Altman also stated that OpenAI is developing a social networking app using AI for a personalized news feed.

I'm interested in exploring a social media app that uses artificial intelligence to create custom feeds based on users' desires

Instead, Meta is promoting its own AI feed through the Meta AI service, but some users have found the new format disorienting.

Let us remind you

Meta invested in Scale AI, which was previously headed by Wang. Competition between companies for leadership in the field of artificial intelligence continues, and the fight for talent is only intensifying.