The AI talent war is getting heated among the large tech companies as they compete for more and more elite groups of AI researchers. According to Openai CEO Sam Altman, Meta is actively chasing the company's top engineers.
Altman said in an episode of No cap The meta “has made huge offers to a lot of people on our team” and total “$100 million signature bonuses and more.” [in] Annual compensation. ”
This is the latest example of fierce competition for top talent, and companies are willing to go to recruit and retain them.
Meta is currently working specifically on AI adoption drives. The company has lost some of the top AI researchers in recent years and is now fighting the story of how the latest Llama 4 models fall behind in AI races after receiving lukewarm responses from developers.
This has reportedly driven Zuckerberg into Overdrive, leading the CEO to personally recruit Meta's new 50 “Superintelligence” AI team. Meta has also recently invested up to $15 billion in a 49% stake in training data company Scaleai as part of its plan to hire the company's CEO Alexandrewan.
Altman said none of his best people had decided to take up Mark Zuckerberg's generous offer, but Meta was able to seduce other prominent AI researchers.
According to Bloomberg, Meta hired Jack Rae, a leading researcher at Google Deepmind, for the team, and Johan Schalkwyk, machine learning leader for AI Voice Startup Sesame. Meta reportedly failed efforts to poach top open ly researcher Norm Brown and Google's AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu.
According to a recent release by SignalFire, Meta tracks fellow AI Labs with a retention rate of 64% Talent Report for 2025. In Buzzy AI startup humanity, 80% of employees hired at least two years ago are still in the company. This is an impressive figure in the industry known for his high sales.
Meta representatives did not immediately respond to recent requests for comment luck, Made outside of the normal working hours of the company.
AI Talent Gap
Zuckerberg's salary offers have reached athlete thresholds. Fortune Sharon Goldman said he has become a par for the industry course.
Deedy Das, VC at Menlo Ventures, previously said luck He's heard of several people that Meta CEOs tried to recruit. “Zack was trying to call potential recruits and convince them to join the $2 million floor.”
Meta may have made headlines, but that's not the only thing that's going to endure and adopt this talent for an extreme long time. Google Deepmind is reportedly implementing a six- to 12-month non-competitive clause that prevents some AI researchers from joining their competitors.
At Openai, the company is rumoured to offer Sky High compensation to keep talented, with top researchers making more than $10 million a year. According to Reuters, the company is offering more than $2 million in retention bonuses and a stock package of over $20 million to stop asylum in Ilya Sutskever's new venture, SSI.
Elite AI Labs work overtime to lock up top talents, but the overall picture of AI engineers, especially junior talent, is not so rosy. Several recent reports including Signalfire 2025 Talent Report, It suggests that entry-level employment in the tech industry is falling apart.
The report states that mid- and senior-level role employment bounced back from the 2023 recession, but the cuts to new alumni have just come. Among the major high-tech companies, new graduates account for just 7% of recruiting, 25% since 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. At startups, new graduates are below 6% of new recruits, 11% since 2023 and over 30% from pre-pandemic levels.
