Meta Accused of Offering $100M Bonus to Lure OpenAI Talent, Altman Says Culture Can’t Be Bought

Meta is on a poaching spree. The company has reportedly been offering extremely high compensation packages to employees at OpenAI, including signing bonuses of $100 million or more, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

In a recent podcast hosted by his brother, Jack Altman, Sam Altman said, “They started making these like giant offers to a lot of people on our team — $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year.” Despite the aggressive hiring attempts, he said that “so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”

According to reports, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting for a new “superintelligence” team, offering hefty payouts to top AI researchers across the industry. Last week, Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and brought on Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, to join the effort.

“The rest of the world, people think of ChatGPT as a Google replacement, but in Meta, people think of ChatGPT as like a Facebook replacement, because people are just spending all their time talking to it,” said Sam Altman, adding that there is a time competition too where users are spending more time. 

Sam Altman acknowledged Meta’s determination in the AI space. He remarked that Meta views them as its primary competitor, noting that its current AI initiatives have not been as successful as anticipated. Altman speculated that if this particular attempt does not succeed, Meta will likely continue to explore new options in the future.

He also questioned the long-term impact of compensation-heavy hiring strategies, adding, “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.”

According to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s approach is more focused on aligning incentives around the mission. “If we succeed at that, everybody will do great financially.”

He concluded by noting the cultural gap between the two companies. “We’ve managed to build a culture that is good at repeatable innovation. I think we understand a lot of things that they don’t about what it takes to succeed at that.”