Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said.
Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday.
“It is crazy,” Sam 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.”
Photo: Getty Images via AFP
The OpenAI cofounder said Meta had made the offers to “a lot of people on our team.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The social media titan has invested billions of dollars in AI technology amid fierce competition with rivals OpenAI, Google and Microsoft Corp.
Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg in January said that the firm planned to invest at least US$60 billion in AI this year, with ambitions to lead in the technology.
Last week, Meta entered into a deal reportedly worth more than US$10 billion with Scale AI Inc, a company specializing in labeling data used in training AI models.
As part of the deal, company founder and CEO Alexandr Wang (汪滔) would join Meta to help with the tech giant’s AI ambitions, including its work on superintelligence efforts.
Comparing Meta to his company, Sam 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,” he added.
Meta has also offered nine-figure annual salaries to Scale AI executives, US media reports said.
“There are many things I respect about Meta as a company,” Sam Altman said. “But I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.”
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