Altman Says Meta Offering $100 Million to Recruit OpenAI Staff

Sam Altman has reportedly accused Meta of offering nine-figure signing bonuses to poach his workers.

The OpenAI CEO says that Meta was making “giant offers” of $100 million as it tries to catch up in the artificial intelligence (AI) race, the Financial Times (FT) reported Wednesday (June 18), citing Altman’s comments on his brother’s Uncapped podcast.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said, noting that none of his “best people” had accepted an offer.

“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.”

The FT report notes that Meta has been scrambling to attract researchers and engineers from rival tech companies for its goal of creating a “superintelligence” team to develop artificial general intelligence.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally been interviewing candidates for this team. So far, the company has been able to convince some AI experts to jump ship. For example, Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, said last week he was moving to Meta.

In addition, Meta has recently announced it would invest $15 billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI, with that company’s co-founder and other employees expected to join Meta.

Still, Meta has suffered several AI-related setbacks, the FT report noted. For example, there are claims that the company boosted performance metrics for the latest iteration of its Llama large language model (LLM). Meta has also faced online criticism for not sharing a full technical report to accompany the model, the report added.

In other AI news, PYMNTS spoke recently with David’s Bridal CEO Kelly Cook about that company’s use of the technology to simplify wedding task management and vendor discovery.

By combining tailored customer journeys with data-driven matchmaking tools, Cook said David’s hopes to firm up its position as a dominant technology, media and retail presence in the wedding sector, backed by new growth capital intended to speed its digital transformation.

“One-hundred percent of our emails are all AI generated now,” Cook said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “We have so much information between that and machine learning that I think we need to expand the talent base that is actually looking at it and learning from it, because you still need humans.”

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