OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has been attempting to lure its staff to work at its AI division with absolutely outrageous compensation. He claimed during a YouTube interview at Uncapped with Jack Altman, who is his brother, that the social media giant is offering $100M signing bonuses to some senior technical people, with even greater annual compensation. This shows how big a bet Meta has placed on AI, and how much it is willing to pour into the project to get a leg up on the competition.
The brothers were talking about Meta’s recent acquisition of Scale AI, which happened about a week ago. “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they’ve hoped, and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things,” Sam said when asked about Meta’s move.
“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. I’m really happy that, at least so far, that none of our best people have decided to take them up on that. I think that people sort of look at the two paths and say, ‘Alright, OpenAI’s got a really good shot — a much better shot, actually — delivering on [AI] superintelligence and also may eventually be the more valuable company.”
As many companies have continued investing billions of dollars in AI hardware over the past few years, they have probably realized that they need equally expensive talent to run them. There have been previous reports that Meta has been losing AI staff despite paying them $2 million annually, with many jumping ship to its rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. If Altman's claims are correct, it may be that Meta has noticed this and has decided to up the ante and pay so much more for senior AI engineers to join its effort.
Sam criticized Meta, saying that the degree it focuses on the compensation — not the work or the mission — will not set up a great culture. Because of this, he says people would rather stay at OpenAI, despite the massive amounts of money that Meta is throwing towards its people. “I hope that we can be the best place in the world to do this kind of research. I think we build a special culture for it, and I think that we’re set up suck that if we succeed at that, and a lot of people on research team believe we will or we have a good chance at it, then everybody will do great, financially,” said Altman. “I think it’s incentive aligned with mission first, and then economic rewards, and everything else flowing from that.”
OpenAI’s people not jumping ship to Meta despite the massive packages it offers makes sense, though. After all, if you’re already making more than enough to support your lifestyle and then some, you really don’t need the extra money in exchange for the risk you’re taking by moving to a different company, especially one that seemingly lags what your current organization has already achieved.
Besides, OpenAI and its people are confident that it will be among the first ones, if not the first one, to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), and then AI superintelligence (ASI), which could make it and its people a lot of money — so much more than what Meta can offer. However, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei has an opposing view about AI development — if the government and society are unprepared, its widespread use can cause unemployment rates to jump to 20% and wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
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