Sam Altman Says Meta Offered OpenAI Staffers $100 Million Bonuses

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said Meta Platforms Inc. has offered his employees signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages, as it seeks to build a top artificial intelligence team.

“It is crazy,” Altman said on the podcast Uncapped, which is hosted by his brother. While Meta has sought to hire “a lot of people” at OpenAI, “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman added.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally recruiting for a new “superintelligence” group, offering high sums to top AI researchers across the industry. Last week, the company announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Meta also recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, to join the team. 

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has poached top engineers from multiple tech firms, including Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, Bloomberg has reported.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said. “I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”

He had a theory for why people are turning down the offers. “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,” he said, noting the cultural risks of creating jobs that could become more about the money than the work. “I think we understand a lot of things they don’t.”