Meta offering $100 million bonuses to poach OpenAI talent, says Sam Altman

Sam Altman said he respects Meta but does not see it as strong on innovation, adding that innovation, not just pay, is what retains talent at OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that Meta Platforms Inc offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million in a bid to lure away top talent from his company, a move he described as “crazy” and indicative of intensifying competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

 

Speaking on Uncapped, a podcast hosted by his brother Jack Altman, the OpenAI chief said Meta has been actively targeting engineers at OpenAI with outsized compensation packages, though none of his top staff have accepted the offers so far.

 

“They started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman said in the interview released on Tuesday (local time). “You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year. So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” 

 

 

Meta ramps up superintelligence push

The remarks come days after Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a data-labelling startup critical to AI model training. Meta also recruited Scale AI's founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its new 'superintelligence' group. The team is tasked with competing for top-tier AI researchers and will be personally overseen by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

 

Meta, which was once seen as a leader in open-source AI development, has faced internal challenges in recent months, including high-profile staff exits and delays in rolling out next-generation open-source models that were expected to rival systems developed by Google DeepMind, China’s DeepSeek, and OpenAI.

 

Meta had also hired Jack Rae, a principal researcher at DeepMind, as part of this renewed recruitment effort, Bloomberg had earlier reported.

 

'We understand things they don’t': Sam Altman

Altman acknowledged that Meta views OpenAI as its primary competitor, but suggested that innovation, not just compensation, is what keeps people at OpenAI.

 

“There are many things I respect about Meta as a company,” Altman said, “but I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.” He added that creating high-paying roles without a strong cultural foundation can risk shifting focus from meaningful work to money.

 

“I think we understand a lot of things they don’t,” he said, arguing that OpenAI’s mission and work culture remain strong draws for its top researchers.