Sam Altman says Meta is dangling $100 million signing bonuses to poach OpenAI employees

Big Tech’s AI talent turf war is heating up. 

Meta has been offering certain OpenAI employees $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship, according to Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT maker.

“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people in our team,” Altman said on his brother’s podcast Tuesday. “It is crazy.  I'm really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them up,” he added.

The comments were in reference to The Information’s report last week that Meta plans to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain. 

Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and CEO of start-up Scale AI, to join the lab, sources told The Information. Meta has also been in talks to invest almost $5 billion into Wang’s company, while bring other Scale AI employees on board. It's part of a wider recruitment effort, sources told the publication, as the firm offers seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of AI researchers from competitors such as OpenAI and Google.

Altman, however, doesn't believe this will be enough to revive Meta's edge, he said on Tuesday's podcast, as attracting workers with financial incentives doesn’t always pay off long-term. “The degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don't think that's going to set up a great culture,” he said. “I think that people sort of look at the two paths and say, alright, OpenAI’s got a really good shot at actually delivering on super intelligence and may eventually be the more valuable company,” he added.

Moreover, while top talent may get a better deal working for Mark Zuckerberg, this isn’t strictly true across the board. The average salaries for software engineers at OpenAI start at $238,000 for entry-level, and climb to $1.34 million for L6, according to estimates by Levels.fyi. By contrast, Meta's average earnings appear lower, ranging from $106,000 to $658,000 for the same roles. 

Altman also delivered a broader critique of his competitor’s ranking in the AI race, comparing its efforts to when Google sought to break into the social media space during the early days of Facebook.

“I don't think they're a company that's great at innovation,” he said of Meta. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped.” Indeed, illustrating this, Meta's new lab is part of a larger re-think of its AI strategy, sources told the New York Times. Internal management struggles over the technology, employee churn and several disappointing product releases, have been holding the company back, they added.