OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has revealed that tech rival Meta is aggressively attempting to recruit members of his team with eye-watering offers, including signing bonuses as high as $100 million.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has ramped up investment in artificial intelligence, recently acquiring a 49% stake in the startup Scale AI for $14 billion. But despite the massive incentives, Altman said that, “at least so far,” none of his top employees had accepted the offers.
Speaking on his brother Jack Altman’s podcast, Altman expressed respect for Meta’s aggressive competition but questioned its innovation credentials. “There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s, like, great at innovation,” he said.
Altman noted that, beyond signing bonuses, Meta was offering even larger annual compensation packages, though he didn’t specify whether this was in the form of salaries, stock options, or other incentives. Still, he believes OpenAI staff are staying because of the company’s unique culture and its mission to build superintelligent AI that could outperform human capabilities.
“Our people stay because of the really special culture and the mission — creating superintelligence and the economic rewards and everything else flowing from that,” he said.
The intense bidding war for AI talent reflects the growing belief within the tech industry that elite researchers and engineers could determine the outcome of the AI race. Indranil Bandyopadhyay, a principal analyst at Forrester, said the huge offers are part of a “high-risk, high-reward gamble,” with talent now viewed as “the most precious and fiercely contested resource” in the sector.
“Whether this intense level of investment is sustainable remains to be seen, but for now, the AI gold rush continues at a breakneck pace,” Bandyopadhyay added.
Big tech firms are investing heavily to stay ahead in the AI arms race. OpenAI, for instance, announced in January that it had joined other funders to commit $500 billion toward building advanced data centres in the US to support future AI development.
Meta has yet to comment on Altman’s remarks