Sam Altman Says Mark Zuckerberg Tries to Poach OpenAI Staffers with $100M Bonuses
As Mark Zuckerberg aggressively assembles a new A.I. team within Meta, the tech billionaire is attempting to poach top staffers at OpenAI with signing bonuses as high as $100 million, according to Sam Altman. “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said in a recent episode of Uncapped, a podcast hosted by his brother, Jack Altman. Sam Altman didn’t elaborate on whether the signing bonuses were offered in cash, stock options or other forms of payment. Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
Meta and OpenAI, alongside other tech giants like Google and Microsoft, are currently locked in a full-speed race to develop advanced A.I. systems that could outsmart human beings. Zuckerberg has plans to assemble a 50-person team amid frustrations that Meta’s current A.I. efforts, such as its open-source model Llama, are not progressing fast enough.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it’s rational of them to keep trying—their current A.I. efforts have not worked as well as they’ve hoped,” said Altman during the podcast episode, which was aired yesterday (June 17). “There are many things I respect from Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” he added.
With plans to spend between $64 billion and $72 billion on A.I. initiatives this year, Meta is ramping up efforts across data centers, hardware, and talent acquisition. Earlier this month, it signed a deal to invest more than $14 billion in Scale AI, a data infrastructure startup. As part of the agreement, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang—a longtime friend of Altman’s—will leave the company to lead Meta’s new A.I. team.
Zuckerberg is personally spearheading Meta’s A.I. recruitment push. According to Bloomberg, he has been meeting nearly all new hires himself, hosting dinners at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto to make personal recruitment pitches, and even rearranging office layouts so that the A.I. team sits closer to him. So far, the company has reportedly succeeded in poaching high-profile talent, including Jack Rae, a researcher at Google DeepMind, and Johan Schalkwyk, a machine learning lead from Sesame AI.
Altman isn’t convinced that Meta’s aggressive compensation packages will translate into long-term success. “To 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,” Altman said. “I think that people sort of look at the two paths and say, all right, OpenAI’s got a really good shot—a much better shot—at actually delivering on superintelligence, and also may eventually be the more valuable company.”
Meta pays software engineering annual packages that range from $212,000 to $3.67 million, while OpenAI pays $238,000 to $1.34 million, including stocks, according to Levels.fyi, a compensation tracking site. Zuckerberg earned $27.2 million last year in stocks and bonuses. He isn’t paid a base salary as CEO of the company.
Rival companies showing interest in OpenAI is nothing new to Altman, who recalled a former Meta employee once telling him that the company viewed ChatGPT as a potential “Facebook replacement.” Unlike Meta’s social feeds, however, Altman argued that ChatGPT aims to be genuinely helpful rather than contributing to unhealthy habits like “doom-scrolling.”
Altman also criticized other tech giants for negatively impacting users, singling out Google for its ad-driven model and Apple for the addictive nature of the iPhone. “And then you have ChatGPT,” he said. “I feel like it’s just trying to help me with whatever I ask—and that’s kind of a nice thing.”