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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of trying to poach his developers with the promise of $100mn sign-on bonuses and even higher compensation, as the social media platform races to catch up in the AI battle.
Altman said Meta, which has a market capitalisation of $1.8tn, had begun to make the “giant offers” to employees on his team after falling behind on their current AI push. “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the Uncapped podcast, which is hosted by his brother.
“I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts haven’t worked as well as they’ve hoped and I respect [them] continuing to be aggressive.” He added that none of his “best people” had taken Zuckerberg up on his offers.
Meta has been racing to poach top researchers and engineers from rival groups as it seeks to build a new “superintelligence” team to develop artificial general intelligence.
Zuckerberg, the chief executive, has been personally selecting and calling talent as part of the superintelligence push, according to one person familiar with the matter and as first reported by Bloomberg. Last week, Meta announced a $15bn investment in data-labelling start-up Scale AI and also hired its co-founder Alexandr Wang.
Despite Zuckerberg repeatedly declaring his intention for the company to become an “AI leader”, Meta has struggled this year to keep pace with its rivals, suffering several setbacks.
Meta has faced claims that it boosted performance metrics for Llama 4, the latest release of its large language model, and has been subjected to online criticism for not releasing a full technical report to accompany the model. In a post on X in April, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s head of GenAI, acknowledged the “mixed quality” users were experiencing, but denied claims that its performance tests did not follow convention.
It has also delayed the release of its flagship AI model called “Behemoth”, and was caught off-guard by rapid advancements in the field by smaller Chinese rival, DeepSeek, made at a fraction of the cost.
Meta has also recently experienced an exodus of AI talent, with several key researchers who built the Llama models leaving over the past few months, as well as Joelle Pineau, head of AI research. Zuckerberg has been reshuffling its generative AI leadership in a bid to catch up. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Altman said that the strategy of “a ton of upfront guaranteed comp” was a poor one, criticising “the degree to which they are focusing on that and not the work and not the mission”. He added: ‘’I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.”
Salaries for a software engineer at OpenAI range from around $238,000 to $1.34mn, according to financial package tracking website Levels, while Meta’s salaries varied from $212,000 to around $3.7mn.
