OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that Meta is trying to poach his company's employees, offering them $100 million to sign a contract. According to Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg is personally meeting with engineers to recruit them to the “superintelligence” team. So far, none of OpenAI's “top people” have accepted his offer.
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, which is behind Chat GPT, while guesting on his brother Jack Altman's podcast “Uncapped”, said that Mark Zuckerberg's company Meta tried to acquire his engineers. As he explained, the creator of Facebook was supposed to offer up to $100 million in bonuses for joining his company. “It's crazy, I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to do this,” said the OpenAI boss.
In a thread about Meta and its recent announcement of a $15 billion investment in startup Scale AI, Altman said he understands Meta being aggressive and constantly trying new things. He added that it makes sense to him to do so, especially since, he said, “their current AI efforts haven’t worked out as well as they hoped.”
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Let us recall that the announced investment in Scale AI is not only about drawing attention to the company dealing with data labeling for the purposes of artificial intelligence machine learning, but also about acquiring its greatest talents, including, above all, the co-founder – 28-year-old Alexander Wang, who will head the “superintelligence” team, as it is called in Meta.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them, as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its artificial intelligence strategy. More here: https://t.co/n7p2pjfuqZ
— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) June 18, 2025
Meta’s latest model, which the company had high hopes for, Llama 4, performed poorly in independent inference and coding tests and critics didn’t like it, and the company itself lags behind OpenAI, Google and even China’s DeepSeek. It’s been a setback for Zuckerberg so far, who has repeatedly stated his intention for Meta to become “the leader in AI.”
Altman noted in the podcast that, to his knowledge, Meta considers OpenAI its biggest competitor. Zuckerberg is said to be personally overseeing the recruitment of Meta’s new AI “superintelligence” team. According to Bloomberg, he played the role of headhunter himself, personally meeting with experts he wanted to hire at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California, the agency reported.
The OpenAI co-founder said that “a lot of guaranteed money up front is not a reason to join a team,” adding that “the extent to which they focus on that rather than on the work and mission” doesn’t create the right work culture, in his opinion.
“I hope we can be the best place in the world to do this kind of research. I think we've built a really unique culture around it. And I think we're set up in a way that if we succeed at this, and a lot of people on our research team believe we can, or that we have a good chance of succeeding, then everyone will do very well financially,” said Sam Altman in the context of working at Open AI.
As reported by the Financial Times, citing data from Levels, a salary monitoring service, OpenAI software engineers' salaries range from about $238,000 to $1.34 million per year, while at Meta they ranged from $212,000 to about $3.7 million. It looks like, in addition to the list of salary ranges, we'll soon have to create lists of the amounts for which employees working in artificial intelligence went to competitors. Just like with football transfers.
Michal Kubicki
