Meta is going all-in on AI, and it’s pulling out the big guns to do it, offering some of the most jaw-dropping pay packages the tech industry has ever seen to poach top talent from OpenAI.
As part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s push to build a new “superintelligence” team, Meta has purportedly offered “eye-watering” compensation packages worth up to $300 million over four years, according to a new report from WIRED. That includes more than $100 million in total first-year compensation, with equity that vests immediately in the first year, per sources familiar with the negotiations.
The offers have mostly targeted OpenAI staff, and at least 10 high-profile pitches have been made so far. One senior researcher was even offered the title of chief scientist at Meta, but declined the role, according to multiple sources.
“That’s about how much it would take for me to go work at Meta,” one OpenAI employee told WIRED, speaking anonymously.
While Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth acknowledged the pay packages during a recent employee Q&A, he pushed back on the scale being reported. “Look, you guys, the market’s hot. It’s not that hot. Okay? So it’s just a lie,” said Bosworth. “We have a small number of leadership roles that we’re hiring for, and those people do command a premium.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone also denied the numbers, saying: “These statements are untrue—the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place.”
Despite the denials, OpenAI appears to be feeling the pressure. After at least seven staffers jumped ship to Meta, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, sent a memo to employees saying it felt “as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”
Chen also noted that OpenAI will “fight” Meta to keep its employees, recalibrating its compensation model but not “at the sacrifice of fairness.” He added that “a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year,” a likely reference to internal concerns around resource allocation. Meta, meanwhile, is promising recruits they’ll never have to worry about running out of GPUs.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman followed up with his own message in Slack, according to WIRED, slamming Meta’s aggressive poaching tactics and hinting that OpenAI is actively reevaluating how it compensates its top researchers. Altman previously confirmed Meta’s $100 million offers to OpenAI engineers on an episode of his brother’s Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast.
With ex-Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman signing on to co-lead Meta’s newly formed “Superintelligence Labs”, it’s clear Zuckerberg is betting big on AI — and sparing no expense to do it.
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