Meta Offers £79m Bonuses to Poach OpenAI AI Talent

Meta is aggressively recruiting top AI researchers from OpenAI, offering some of the most lucrative packages in tech history, including signing bonuses reportedly up to $100 million, to build a new superintelligence team. This talent poaching has led to notable departures from OpenAI, including key researchers from its Zurich office and contributors to GPT-4 and other models. OpenAI's leadership, including Chief Research Officer Mark Chen and CEO Sam Altman, have characterized Meta's recruitment as akin to theft and are responding by recalibrating compensation and seeking creative ways to retain and reward their talent, while maintaining fairness among employees. Meta's strategy, led personally by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, also involves direct outreach to researchers and negotiations to onboard high-profile AI entrepreneurs and investors, aiming to compete not only in frontier research but also in product development for generative AI. The intense competition for AI talent highlights the broader industry race to dominate artificial general intelligence development. Both companies are deeply engaged in this escalating war for experts critical to advancing their AI capabilities.