The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of offering as high as $100 million in signing bonuses in its aggressive bid to poach AI talent from the ChatGPT maker.

Altman made the disclosure during an episode of Uncapped, a podcast hosted by his brother, where he described the compensation packages Meta is offering as “crazy.” 

“They’ve tried to hire a lot of people at OpenAI. “So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligence team 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly taking a hands-on role in building the company’s new “superintelligence” team, personally recruiting top AI researchers from across the industry.

• In a major show of intent, Meta recently invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, and brought on Scale’s CEO Alexandr Wang to join its AI efforts.
• The company has also lured talent from other top AI labs. According to Bloomberg, Meta recently poached Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind.
• While acknowledging Meta’s aggressive strategy, Altman suggested that OpenAI’s talent is not easily swayed by massive paydays.

“I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things. But I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” he said.

He added that cultural factors play a key role in retaining talent, arguing that chasing high compensation could ultimately detract from meaningful work.

“I think we understand a lot of things they don’t,” he said.

Meta has not responded to requests for comment at the time of this report.

What you should know 

Meta, once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models, has suffered from staff departures and has postponed the launches of new open-source AI models that could rival competitors like Google, China’s DeepSeek, and OpenAI.

As part of its aggressive push for dominance, Meta recently invested in Scale AI in a deal that values the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and brings in its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to play a prominent role in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence strategy.

• Meta takes a 49% stake for $14.3 billion. However, sources who are in the know of the deal told Reuters that the main driver for Meta’s substantial investment in Scale was to secure Wang to lead its new superintelligence unit.
• Wang, who was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Chinese immigrant physicists, dropped out of MIT to co-found Scale.
• He was quickly lauded as one of Silicon Valley’s most promising entrepreneurs, raising funding from blue-chip venture capital firms and achieving billionaire status in his 20s.

[Nairametrics]