Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta’s attempts to poach his best staff with generous signing bonuses were not successful.
Altman talked about the competition OpenAI faces from Meta on his brother’s podcast “Uncapped with Jack Altman,” in an episode that aired on Tuesday.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they’ve hoped,” Altman said of Meta’s $15 billion investment in data-labeling firm Scale AI.
But Altman said he found it “crazy” when Meta tried to recruit OpenAI’s employees by offering them $100 million signing bonuses if they jumped ship.
“I’m really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said.
“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 superintelligence and also may eventually be the more valuable company,'” he continued.
Meta has a $1.77 trillion market capitalization, and OpenAI was last valued at $300 billion in March.
Altman said Meta’s approach of growing its talent pool by dangling eye-watering pay packages could come at the expense of its culture.
“The strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really 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.
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they are a company that’s like great at innovation,” he added.
The hunt for AI talent has been heating up as companies seek to dominate the field.
Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of AI search startup Perplexity, said in a March 2024 episode of the “Invest Like The Best” podcast that companies must offer “amazing incentives and immediate availability of compute” if they want to hire AI talent.
“I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? ‘Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'” Srinivas said, referencing the AI chips made by Nvidia.
Naveen Rao, the vice president of AI at Databricks, said in an interview with The Verge last year that there are fewer than 1,000 researchers who are capable of building frontier AI models.
“It’s like looking for LeBron James,” Rao said. “There are just not very many humans who are capable of that.”
Representatives for OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
