A leading executive at Meta has criticized OpenAI’s Sam Altman for being “dishonest” about Mark Zuckerberg allegedly offering $100 million compensation packages to lure away the startup’s top AI experts.
“Sam is just being dishonest here,” remarked Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, during a companywide meeting on Thursday, reported by The Verge. “He’s implying we’re making such offers for every single person… Listen, the market is competitive, but it’s not that extreme.”
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is in an intense rivalry with ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI, in the race to advance artificial intelligence. Recent strategic actions by Zuckerberg include setting up a new AI lab aimed at achieving “superintelligence” and investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI.
Altman stirred the pot further last week when he said Meta had “started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team” during an appearance on the “Uncapped” podcast.
“You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year,” Altman said at the time. He added that “so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
However, in the week since Altman’s remarks surfaced, a handful of OpenAI researchers have jumped ship to join Meta.
Among them was Lucas Beyer, who confirmed in an X post that he and colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai were lured away by Zuckerberg.
However, Byers noted that the trio “did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news.”
Key OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal – a main contributor to OpenAI’s first-ever AI reasoning model o1 – has also switched teams, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
In Thursday’s all-hands meeting, Bosworth told Meta’s employees that Altman’s claims were missing key context.
“What Sam neglects to mention is that he’s countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles,” Bosworth said.
“Sam is known to exaggerate, and in this case, I know exactly why he’s doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI,” he added. “He’s not very happy about that.”
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment on Bosworth’s remarks.
