Meta failed to poach OpenAI with a signing bonus of up to $100 million, Altman said there is still a gap in innovation culture

According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Meta (formerly Facebook) is trying to poach core technical talents from OpenAI with a signing bonus of up to $100 million and a higher annual salary. However, Altman pointed out that no core OpenAI employees have accepted Meta's invitation so far.

It is reported that Meta is accelerating its "superintelligence" strategic deployment recently, forming a top artificial intelligence research team, and recently invested $14.3 billion in AI data annotation platform Scale AI, and included its CEO Alexandr Wang in the core leadership of the "superintelligence" project.

Altman commented in the podcast that although Meta has strong capital and expansion ambitions, "there is still a big gap with OpenAI in terms of innovation capabilities and corporate culture." He emphasized that OpenAI has long attached importance to the "mission-driven" research and development atmosphere and in-depth thinking on the ethics of the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). This culture is an important foundation for team cohesion.

Meta has not made an official response to this talent war. However, people familiar with the matter pointed out that in order to accelerate its AI capability layout, Meta has launched aggressive recruitment worldwide, targeting talents from leading AI research institutions including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Mistral.

This move has also caused concerns in the industry about the increasingly fierce competition for AI talents. With the rapid development of AI large model technology, senior engineers and researchers with core capabilities such as Transformer architecture, training algorithms, and data engineering are in short supply. Many technology giants have poached them with salaries far higher than the industry average, including a basic annual salary starting at seven figures, options and huge signing bonuses.

Analysts pointed out that Meta's large investment in Scale AI shows that it not only focuses on model research and development, but also hopes to control the supply chain of high-quality training data. Inviting Alexandr Wang to join the "super intelligence" team may mean that Meta is trying to create a more complete "model-data-computing power" closed loop to benchmark rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

However, Altman's remarks also show OpenAI's confidence and vigilance in the risk of employee turnover. Industry observers believe that the coming months will be an important observation period for the battle for AI talent and may also reshape the competitive landscape of the global AI industry.