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Want to work on AI at Meta? Mark Zuckerberg might pay you up to $100 million if you’re a top researcher in the field.
The Facebook founder has been dangling the lucrative deals to try and poach employees at OpenAI, according to the company’s CEO Sam Altman.
“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp (compensation) per year,” Altman told his brother, Jack Altman, on a Tuesday podcast.
The statement confirms earlier reporting from The New York Times, which found that Meta is offering “seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers” at the top AI companies including Google. This comes as Meta partially acquired Scale AI, poaching its founder Alexandr Wang.
Mark Zuckerberg’s goal is to create a new lab dedicated to developing superintelligent AI when Meta has already been spending billions on the GPU hardware for AI training. But it looks like the massive compensation deals haven’t been enough to lure the top staffers at OpenAI. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take him up on that,” Altman said in the podcast.
Altman also took some digs at Zuckerberg, saying OpenAI has “a much better shot” at delivering AI super intelligence, while having the potential to exceed Meta’s corporate value. In addition, Altman said Zuckerberg’s focus on offering a high compensation to poach staff was flawed.
“I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture. And I hope we can be the best place in the world to do this research,” Altman added, later saying: “I think its incentive aligned, with mission first, and then economic rewards and everything else flowing from that.”
Not everyone will agree considering OpenAI’s board famously fired Altman as CEO only to hire him back amid an internal struggle for leadership control. Other OpenAI executives and researchers have since resigned either to focus on their own startups or because the company allegedly ignored commitments to safety.
Still, Altman said during the podcast he’s confident that OpenAI has the foundation to create other hit AI products, following the success of ChatGPT. “There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company,” Altman added. “But I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation. The special thing about OpenAI is we’ve managed to build a culture that is good at repeatable innovation.”
Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.