Desperate Zuckerberg Apparently Offering OpenAI Staffers $100 Million Bonuses to Come Save His Failing AI Efforts

Certain sought-after AI engineers might want to jot this down: Mark Zuckerberg is apparently offering sign-on bonuses as high as $100 million — yes, a full tenth of a billion dollars — to join Meta's new "superintelligence" AI lab.

There's only one caveat to snagging this life-altering offer: you need to work at OpenAI to get the invite.

According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Zuckerberg has been trying to poach his employees by offering nine-figure welcome bonuses, on top of annual salaries ranging anywhere from seven to nine figures.

Altman, sometimes said to be Zuckerberg's chief co-competitor in the mythic "AI race," complained that Meta has attempted to hire "a lot of people" from his company. "So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," he said on his brother Jack Altman's "Uncapped" podcast.

Poaching is a common — though sometimes legally dubious — tactic in the highfalutin business world, and usually happens when a firm looks to scoop up a rival's high-profile executives, and sometimes the executive's underlings.

In the US tech space, poaching usually looks like "big tech" firms nabbing promising young staffers from up-and-coming startups, fueling widespread allegations that the American tech industry runs on monopoly power rather than innovation.

For Meta, poaching is both a familiar move, and likely a necessary one, if the company hopes to eke out the monopoly on consumer large language models (LLMs.)

The company recently acquired the sketchy startup Scale AI, and is working to integrate its employees into Zuckerberg's superintelligence AI unit. That recently formed team is widely understood as Meta's last-ditch attempt to pull out all the stops in the face of mounting LLM failures.

"I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor," Sam Altman quipped. "Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things."

In all, Meta's seeking to fill 50 seats, with Zuckerberg reported to be personally involved in recruitment. His company has successfully poached researchers from Google's AI research group DeepMind, including Jack Rae, the team's principal scientist.

But whether Zuckerberg's deep pockets will turn the tide on Meta's lagging LLM development remains to be seen. Altman, of course, has his doubts that you can buy an innovative team outright.

"I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying 'we're just going to try to copy OpenAI,'" he said. "That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate."