Openai CEO Sam Altman said Meta's attempt to poach his best staff with a generous signature bonus has not been successful.
In an episode aired Tuesday, Altman spoke about Open Alley's face competition from Meta on his brother's podcast, “Jack Altman and Uncapped.”
“I've heard that Meta considers us as their biggest competitor. I think it's reasonable for them to continue trying. Their current AI efforts aren't working as well as they wanted,” Altman said of his $15 billion investment in data literacy company scale AI.
However, Altman said he felt “crazy” when he tried to recruit Openai employees by offering a $100 million signature bonus if Meta jumps on the ship.
“I'm really pleased that no one has decided to take it up, at least so far, that our best people have decided to take it,” Altman said.
“People look at two paths and say, “Imperfect, Openai has really good shots. They actually have much better shots.
META has a market capitalization of $1.77 trillion, and Openai was valued at $300 billion in March.
Altman said Meta's approach to expanding the talent pool by hanging an eye-opening wage package could come at the expense of that culture.
“I don't think it's a mission and it's not going to set a great culture, like the massive amount of pre-guaranteed Comp's strategy and the reason why they're telling someone to participate and actually focusing on it rather than the work,” Altman said.
“There's a lot I admire about the meta as a company, but I don't think they're the kind of company that's great at innovation,” he added.
The hunt for AI talents is getting heated as businesses try to dominate the field.
Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of AI Search Startup Prplexity, said in an episode of the March 2024 Invest like the Best podcast, where if you want to hire AI talent, companies must provide “amazing incentives and immediate availability.”
“I tried to hire a very senior researcher in Meta, but do you know what they said? “Get back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,” Srinivas said.
Naveen Rao, Databricks' vice president of AI, said in an interview with Verge last year that there are fewer than 1,000 researchers who can build frontier AI models.
“It's like looking for LeBron James,” Rao said. “Not many people can do that.”
Representatives from Openai and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
