Elon Musk has raided Meta’s collection of talented researchers, despite Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offering some a fortune to choose his company instead. The workers were part of Zuckerberg’s AI team, helping Meta in the global race to build superintelligence, an almost godlike form of artificial intelligence that could think for itself and be much smarter than any human. Musk himself has gloated about the departures , posting on X that ‘many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial [compensation].’

At least 14 Meta researchers and engineers have left for their new home at Musk’s AI competitor since January, while others have fled to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT . A spokesperson for Meta told the Daily Mail: ‘Some attrition is normal for any organization of this size.’ The company official also confirmed that none of the researchers who left for xAI were part of new TBD Lab, the group being tasked with overseeing Meta’s renewed efforts to create superintelligence.

The key employees leaving have included Xinlei Chen, a research scientist at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, research scientist Ching-Yao Chuang, Alan Rice, Meta’s data center manager, and Sheng Sen, an AI research scientist who helped scale Meta’s flagship Llama AI models. Llama is similar to xAI’s Grok and ChatGPT, designed to understand questions people ask it and generate human-like responses, images, and videos, but Meta’s version has met with several challenges and setbacks. The company has already seen massive shakeups this year, including the acquisition of Scale AI, a startup that trains AI models, for $14.3 billion, and the decision to abandon its previous AI model, Behemoth, after it failed to meet expectations.

Although Musk has been bragging about poaching many from Zuckerberg’s AI workforce, it was recently revealed in court that Musk also offered to join forces with Meta in a hostile takeover of billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI but said he left because he felt it was becoming too focused on profit and not enough on safety and openness. In 2024, he filed a lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI for allegedly breaching the agreement the co-founders made about its for-profit motivations when the company was formed.

Court documents, revealed by CNBC this month, showed that Musk sent a letter to Meta proposing an alliance to acquire OpenAI for $97.4 billion earlier this year, but Zuckerberg did not sign the letter of intent. According to both of Zuckerberg’s AI rivals, the exodus from Meta has had more to do with the culture and working environment than the paychecks xAI and OpenAI have been offering. ‘xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta,’ Musk wrote in the August 3 post , revealing that the researchers had joined his AI company.

‘And we are hyper merit-based: do something great and your [compensation] can shift substantially higher,’ the Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO added. In June, Altman claimed that Zuckerberg had been making massive offers to Meta’s AI workers and OpenAI staffers, including deals worth more than $100 million per year, plus bonuses. ‘They started making these like giant offers to a lot of people on our team, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in compensation] per year. It is crazy,’ Altman told his brother, Jack, on the Uncapped podcast.

‘I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that ,’ added Altman, OpenAI’s CEO since 2019. For those on Meta’s radar of top tier AI talent they were looking to acquire, the contract offers reached $300 million over four years, according to WIRED . ‘I think the strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp, and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work and not the mission. I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,’ Altman added during the June 17 podcast.

However, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, noted that Altman failed to mention how his AI company has been countering those mega offers to keep his staff from leaving. ‘The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,’ Bosworth said, according to Business Insider . Meta, OpenAI, and xAI all believe superintelligence could do amazing things, such as curing diseases, creating new technologies, and even helping humanity understand the universe.

It could also manage complex tasks, make decisions, and predict future events with incredible accuracy. Musk’s xAI has been speeding towards this goal by combining expertise from different fields within his organization. The CEO has sent many of his engineers from Tesla to build advanced data centers in the pursuit of mastering AI, which has attracted researchers from his competitors. Meanwhile, Altman’s OpenAI has made significant progress with their GPT models, which are getting smarter and can handle tasks like writing essays, creating art, and even help with coding.