Imran Rahman-Jones
Technology reporter
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The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, says members of his team have been getting “giant offers” from rival tech firm Meta, including $100m (£74.3m) “signing bonuses.”
Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – is attempting to boost the artificial intelligence (AI) side of its business, including recently spending $14bn (£10.4bn) to buy 49% of the startup, Scale AI.
However Mr Altman said “at least so far” none of his “best people” had been persuaded to jump ship.
BBC News has contacted Meta for a response.
Indranil Bandyopadhyay, principal analyst at Forrester, said the figures reflected the belief within the tech industry that “a handful of elite researchers and engineers can provide a decisive competitive advantage.”
With investment in AI running at extraordinary levels talent acquisition is a “high-risk, high-reward gamble,” he told the BBC.
“Whether this intense level of investment is sustainable remains to be seen, but for now, the AI gold rush continues at a breakneck pace, with talent as its most precious and fiercely contested resource.”
Culture versus compensation
Speaking on his brother Jack’s podcast, Sam Altman said he respected Meta’s aggression in competing with OpenAI, which makes the world’s best known AI-powered product, ChatGPT.
He said in addition to the signing bonuses, Meta was offering more than that in “compensation per year”, though did not spell out whether that was in wages or stock options and other incentives.
But Mr Altman said he thought people were staying at OpenAI because of its “really special culture” and “mission” of creating superintelligence and the “economic awards and everything else flowing from that”.
OpenAI and other AI firms think artificial general intelligence (AGI) is not far off, which would mean AI systems can perform as well as – or better than – humans.
Superintelligence is the next step, where the aim is to create AI which can vastly outperform human cognitive abilities.
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s, like, great at innovation,” Mr Altman told his brother.
Big tech firms are spending vast amounts of money researching and developing AI.
For example, in January OpenAI announced a joint deal with other funders to spend $500bn on a number of new data centres – which power AI – in the US.
The amount of money being spent on AI “reflects a belief… that we’re at the dawn of a transformative shift that will reshape almost every business sector,” Edward Keelan, partner at Octopus Ventures, a venture capital fund based in the UK, said.
“The very top talent has the potential to define the future of AI models and infrastructure, and can attract extraordinary offers as a result,” he added.
Tech bros and their barbs
Sam Altman’s comments are just the latest example of the leading figures in tech offering opinions on what their rivals are doing, with podcasts being a popular medium for these sometimes unflattering appraisals.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast in January, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg praised Apple’s iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time.”
But he added the company had recently “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things.”
However, that put down is as nothing compared to Mr Zuckerberg’s stormy relationship with fellow tech titan Elon Musk, with the pair threatening to fight each other in a cage.
Musk is also currently involved in a legal battle with Sam Altman over the founding of OpenAI.