In Silicon Valley's high-stakes race for AI dominance, Meta has deployed unprecedented financial firepower to lure top talent from industry leader OpenAI, with compensation packages that have shocked even veteran tech observers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed in mid-June that Meta had been making "giant offers to a lot of people on our team," including "$100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year." Speaking on his brother's podcast, Altman claimed that despite these astronomical offers, "none of our best people have decided to take them up on that."
However, Meta's aggressive recruitment drive has yielded results. By early July, the company had successfully poached at least ten researchers from OpenAI, including several key figures who helped develop GPT models. These researchers are joining Meta's new Superintelligence Labs, personally overseen by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has reportedly been directly involved in recruitment efforts.
The talent war reflects Meta's determination to catch up in AI after falling behind competitors. Zuckerberg has committed $65 billion to AI development in 2025 alone, including a $14 billion investment in Scale AI that brought its 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang into Meta's leadership team.
In response to the exodus, Altman told OpenAI staff that while Meta had recruited "a few great people," they had "failed to hire their top people and had to go quite far down their list." He argued that Meta's focus on compensation rather than mission would lead to "very deep cultural problems," insisting that "missionaries will beat mercenaries."
Industry experts estimate there are only about 2,000 people worldwide capable of pushing the boundaries of large language models and advanced AI research, making specialized talent perhaps the most valuable resource in tech today. OpenAI has responded by "recalibrating compensation" for researchers while also developing new talent through its residency program, which offers promising candidates from adjacent fields a pathway into AI research.