Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker's talent and strengthen its own generative AI teams, the startup's CEO, Sam Altman, has said.
The alleged attempts by Meta to hire OpenAI staffers are the latest signs of a frenzy to hire top engineers to develop AI models, and they come at a time when Facebook's parent company is working on building its superintelligence unit to catch up with competitors.
Competition for AI talent has reached a feverish pitch as superstar researchers are being courted like professional athletes on the belief that individual contributors can make or break companies.
A competitor of OpenAI, Meta had also offered "giant" annual salaries exceeding $100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the "Uncapped with Jack Altman" podcast released Tuesday.
"It is crazy," Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. "I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that."
The OpenAI cofounder said Meta had made the offers to "a lot of people on our team."
"I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Altman said.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models, Meta has suffered from staff departures and has postponed the launches of new open-source AI models.
The social media titan has invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence technology amid fierce competition in the AI race with rivals OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in January that the firm planned to invest at least $60 billion in AI this year, with ambitions to lead in the technology.
Last week, Meta entered into a deal reportedly worth more than $10 billion with Scale AI, a company specializing in labeling data used in training artificial intelligence models.
As part of the deal, company founder and CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta to help with the tech giant's AI ambitions, including its work on superintelligence efforts.
Comparing Meta to his company, Altman said on the podcast that "OpenAI has a much better shot at delivering on superintelligence."
"I think the strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join... I don't think that's going to set up a great culture," the OpenAI boss added.
According to U.S. media reports, Meta has also offered nine-figure annual salaries to Scale AI executives.
"There's many things I respect about Meta as a company," said Altman. "But I don't think they're a company that's great at innovation."
