Meta offering $100m plus to poach my staff

The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, says members of his team have been getting “giant offers” from rival tech firm Meta, including $100m (£74.3m) “signing bonuses.”

Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – is attempting to boost the artificial intelligence (AI) side of its business, including recently spending $14bn (£10.4bn) to buy 49% of the startup, Scale AI.

However Mr Altman said “at least so far” none of his “best people” had been persuaded to jump ship.

BBC News has contacted Meta for a response.

Speaking on his brother Jack’s podcast, Sam Altman said he respected Meta’s aggression in competing with OpenAI, which makes the world’s best known AI-powered product, ChatGPT.

He said in addition to the signing bonuses, Meta was offering more than that in “compensation per year”, though did not spell out whether that was in wages or stock options and other incentives.

But Mr Altman said he thought people were staying at OpenAI because of its “mission” of creating superintelligence and the “economic awards and everything else flowing from that”.

OpenAI and other AI firms think artificial general intelligence (AGI) is not far off, which would mean AI systems can perform as well as – or better than – humans.

Superintelligence is the next step, where the aim is to create AI which can vastly outperform human cognitive abilities.

Big tech firms are spending vast amounts of money pursing these goals.

For example, in January OpenAI announced a joint deal with other funders to spend $500bn on a number of new data centres – which power AI – in the US.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Altman said he thinks OpenAI has “a much better shot at actually delivering on superintelligence, and also may eventually be the more valuable company.”

He said it is “a really special culture” at OpenAI which attracts engineers to the company, especially when it comes to innovation.

“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s, like, great at innovation,” he told his brother.

Though he called Meta’s pursuit of superintelligence “rational,” he compared it to Google’s failed attempt at setting up a social media platform to rival Facebook.

Sam Altman’s comments are just the latest example of the leading figures in tech offering opinions on what their rivals are doing, with podcasts being a popular medium for these sometimes unflattering appraisals.

On Joe Rogan’s podcast in January, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg praised Apple’s iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time.”

But he added the company had recently “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things.”

However, that put down is as nothing compared to Mr Zuckerberg’s stormy relationship with fellow tech titan Elon Musk, with the pair threatening to fight each other in a cage.

Musk is also currently involved in a legal battle with Sam Altman over the founding of OpenAI.