š° Metaās $100M Offer Canāt Tempt OpenAI Staff! AI Talent War Gets Wild!
The race to dominate artificial intelligence has turned into a high-stakes bidding war! According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech giant Meta (Facebookās parent company) has been offering jaw-dropping $100 million signing bonuses, plus annual pay exceeding that amount, to poach top AI talent from OpenAI. Speaking on his brotherās podcast āUncapped,ā Altman claimed that none of OpenAIās best people have taken the bait ā despite personal outreach from Metaās CEO Mark Zuckerberg and even fancy meetings at his private homes in California š š¼.
Metaās aggressive efforts come as it scrambles to catch up in the AI race. Just last week, Meta poured $14 billion into startup Scale AI and launched a new āsuperintelligence divisionā led by 26-year-old founder Alexandr Wang. Still, despite these moves and offering sky-high salaries ā reportedly up to $2 million per year ā Meta is losing key talent to rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Venture firm SignalFire revealed that Anthropic is attracting more researchers than it's losing, while firms like Hugging Face and Safe Superintelligence are also grabbing attention with multimillion-dollar retention deals š„š¤Æ.
As the competition heats up, U.S. lawmakers are beginning to question whether these massive compensation packages could raise ethical or regulatory issues. But for now, the AI talent war is fully on. From $100M bonuses to personal CEO pitches, tech giants are doing whatever it takes to build the smartest teams. Still, as Altman points out, loyalty, mission, and meaningful work seem to be outweighing even the most outrageous checks ā at least for now šš„.