A top Meta executive called OpenAI’s Sam Altman “dishonest” for claiming that Mark Zuckerberg was offering $100 million pay packages to poach the startup’s top AI researchers.
“Sam is just being dishonest here,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said during a companywide all-hands meeting on Thursday, according to The Verge. “He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market’s hot. It’s not that hot.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is locked in a heated competition with the ChatGPT maker to develop advanced artificial intelligence. Recent moves by Zuckerberg include creating a new AI lab focused on achieving “superintelligence” and investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI.
Altman stirred the pot further last week when he said Meta had “started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team” during an appearance on the “Uncapped” podcast.
“You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year,” Altman said at the time. He added that “so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
However, in the week since Altman’s remarks surfaced, a handful of OpenAI researchers have jumped ship to join Meta.
Among them was Lucas Beyer, who confirmed in an X post that he and colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai were lured away by Zuckerberg.
However, Byers noted that the trio “did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news.”
Key OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal – a main contributor to OpenAI’s first-ever AI reasoning model o1 – has also switched teams, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
In Thursday’s all-hands meeting, Bosworth told Meta’s employees that Altman’s claims were missing key context.
“What Sam neglects to mention is that he’s countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles,” Bosworth said.
“Sam is known to exaggerate, and in this case, I know exactly why he’s doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI,” he added. “He’s not very happy about that.”
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment on Bosworth’s remarks.
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