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- Sam Altman said Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses to OpenAI employees to jump ship.
- But an OpenAI researcher who recently joined Meta said he wasn’t given such a bonus.
- Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, said Altman and OpenAI had countered Meta’s offers.
A former OpenAI researcher who left the ChatGPT maker for Meta said he didn’t receive a $100 million signing bonus when he joined the social media giant.
Lucas Beyer joined OpenAI in November and helped set up its Zurich office with two of his colleagues, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. On Thursday, Beyer wrote in an X post that the three had moved to Meta.
Meta’s hiring of Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The trio had worked as research scientists at Google DeepMind before they joined OpenAI.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in an episode of the “Uncapped with Jack Altman” podcast that aired last week that Meta had tried to poach his best employees. Altman said he found it “crazy” that Meta was dangling $100 million signing bonuses to recruit his staff.
“I’m really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” he added.
“No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news,” Beyer wrote on X on Thursday, but did not elaborate on the offer they had received.
The three former OpenAI employees did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment.
Meta has been ramping up its AI hiring efforts in a bid to dominate the field. Earlier this month, Meta said it had made a $15 billion investment in data-labeling firm Scale AI. The investment will also see ScaleAI’s founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang leave his company to join Meta to work on their superintelligence efforts.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they’ve hoped,” Altman said of Meta’s investment in Scale AI on the “Uncapped with Jack Altman” podcast.
Altman said he felt that the aggressive hiring strategy would not lead to a “great culture” at Meta.
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they are a company that’s like great at innovation,” he said.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, responded to Altman’s comments in an interview with CNBC last week. Bosworth told the outlet that Altman and OpenAI had countered Meta’s offers.
Bosworth told CNBC that the scarcity of AI talent means a “relatively small pool of people” can command an “incredible market premium” for their skills.
“The free market will do its thing. People see these numbers, and they are going to start to build this expertise. A couple years from now, it will probably be very different and there will be a lot of people with this talent pool,” Bosworth said.
“But today, it’s a relatively small number and I think they have earned it,” he added.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
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