Is Meta giving USD 100 million (roughly Rs 10 crore) signing bonuses to OpenAI staff to make a job switch? Yes and no. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth cleared the air over Sam Altman’s claim – bordering accusation – that’s going viral on the internet during an all-hands company meeting, calling the OpenAI chief “dishonest” and someone who’s “known to exaggerate” things. Meanwhile, three top OpenAI researchers – Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – separately denied getting any $100 million bonus for joining Meta calling it fake news.
Altman went on record recently to claim that Meta was trying to poach top talent from his startup with $100 million signing bonuses but “none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.” This is clearly big news, so big enough that even Meta’s own existing employees are curious, curious enough to ask top management, “what’s going on?” when opportunity strikes. The hands-on meeting gave them the chance, and CTO “Boz” was all ears, according to a report from The Verge. Bosworth ripped into Sam Altman’s remarks calling him dishonest for suggesting that Meta was “doing this for every single person.”
What he is probably hinting at is that Meta might be offering a hefty package to nab top OpenAI talent, even to the tune of $100 million perhaps, but it is reserved for “a very, very small number of people,” for “senior, senior leadership roles,” and “it’s not [a] sign-on bonus” as widely reported. Bosworth also said that he knew why Altman was making these “exaggerated” remarks. It was because he is not happy that “we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI.”
One of these big hires, Lucas Beyer, took to X (formerly Twitter), to confirm he along with fellow colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – all ex-AI researchers at OpenAI – were joining Meta and were excited about what’s ahead while simultaneously denying getting “100M sign-on” bonuses, calling it fake news.
During the same internal meeting, Bosworth said, that “quite a few more” OpenAI researchers are going to soon join Meta though he “can’t announce or share [more details] right now.”
If you’re wondering why Meta is on a hiring spree lately, it is because it is building a new superintelligence team to bolster its AI efforts in a bid to counter growing competition from OpenAI and Google, particularly in areas like reasoning and reinforcement engineering, where it is largely lagging. The goal, as it is for every AI company, is to eventually achieve artificial general intelligence or AGI. To that effect, it has bought a substantial 49 percent stake in Scale AI while hiring its 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the newly founded superintelligence venture. Meta has also reportedly approached GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross to come on-board.
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