Meta on Wednesday pushed back on reports that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has offered as much as $300 million to poach talent from OpenAI in the battle for artificial intelligence supremacy.
Zuckerberg allegedly extended the highly lucrative offers to at least 10 staffers at OpenAI who were given the option of taking equity in Meta — with $100 million of the stock vesting in the first year and up to $300 million over four years, online tech news site Wired reported.
A Meta spokesperson laughed off the eye-popping offers, noting that the pay packages would dwarf the annual compensation paid last year to some of Big Tech’s most prized top executives, including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi ($39.4 million) and Microsoft boss Satya Nadella ($79.1 million).
“These statements are untrue — the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told The Post.
“Some people have chosen to greatly exaggerate what’s happening for their own purposes.”
The Post has sought comment from Wired.
Meta has hired at least eight researchers from OpenAI in recent weeks, according to multiple reports.
The confirmed hires include high-level personnel who played key roles in the development and training of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models.
The newly confirmed Meta recruits are Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, Trapit Bansal, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai.
Several sources suggest the number of defections could be slightly higher.
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Four of the most recent hires — Zhao, Yu, Bi, and Ren — joined Meta’s new Superintelligence unit, which is led by Alexandr Wang.
Three others — Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai — previously worked at OpenAI’s Zurich office. Bansal joined earlier in June.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has slammed Zuckerberg’s aggressive sales pitch, telling employees that Meta “is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful.”
“Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list,” Altman wrote on a Slack message to employees that Wired said it had viewed.
Altman said that Meta had been “trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist.”
“I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries,” the OpenAI chief wrote.
Over the weekend, OpenAI’s top research officer sent a memo to staffers vowing that the company would go toe-to-toe with Meta in the battle for top talent.
Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, sent the memo just after Zuckerberg managed to successfully lure four senior researchers.
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote in the memo obtained by Wired.
“Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”
Chen wrote that he and Altman were working “around the clock to talk to those with offers” and that “we’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.”
Altman has also touted his own firm to prospective defectors.
“I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock,” he wrote.
“But I think it’s important that huge upside comes after huge success; what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it’s very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target.”
Zuckerberg is making a bold push to put Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, at the forefront of artificial intelligence with last week’s launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a new unit focused on building AI systems with human-level or greater reasoning capabilities.
Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring a 49% stake as part of its artificial generative intelligence strategy.
Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, came aboard to become Meta’s first chief AI officer, while Nat Friedman, ex-GitHub CEO, was added to lead AI products.
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