OpenAI boss Sam Altman claims staff have been being offered “giant offers” of around $100m (£74.3m) “signing bonuses” by competitor tech firm Meta. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is trying to grow the artificial intelligence (AI) aspect of its business, including spending $14bn (£10.4bn) in March to acquire 49% of startup Scale AI.
But Mr Altman added “at least so far” none of his “best people” had yet been swayed to switch. Indranil Bandyopadhyay, Forrester’s principal analyst, said the statistics represented the assumption in the technology sector that “a few star researchers and engineers can give a make-or-break competitive edge.”
With AI spending at record levels hiring talent is a “high-stakes, high-reward bet,” he explained to the BBC. How long this frantic pace of investment can continue remains to be seen, but in the meantime, the AI gold rush presses on at breakneck speed, with talent its most valuable and hotly contested commodity.”
Talking on his brother Jack’s podcast, Sam Altman stated he admired Meta’s aggressiveness in challenging OpenAI, the world’s best-known AI-driven product, ChatGPT. He added aside from the signing bonuses, Meta was putting more than that into “compensation per year”, though did not specify if that was wages or stock options and other rewards.
But Mr Altman said he believed people were remaining at OpenAI due to its “really special culture” and “mission” to develop superintelligence and the “economic rewards and everything else flowing from that”.
OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner, or that AI systems will be able to rival – and possibly exceed – human performance.
Superintelligence is the next step, in which the goal is to develop AI which is able to greatly surpass human cognitive capacity. There are a lot of things that I admire about Meta as a business, but I don’t think they’re a business that’s, like, really good at innovation,” Mr Altman said to his brother.
Giant tech companies are investing enormous sums of cash into AI research and development. For instance, in January OpenAI revealed a joint agreement with other backers to invest $500bn in a series of new data centres – which fuel AI – in the US.
The level of money being invested in AI “reflects a view. that we’re at the beginning of a revolution that will change nearly every business sector,” Edward Keelan, who is a partner at Octopus Ventures, a UK-based venture capital fund, said.
“The absolute best talent has the potential to set the future course for AI models and infrastructure, and can receive outlandish offers as a result,” he added. Sam Altman’s remarks are only the latest illustration of the tech industry’s biggest players giving their takes on what their competitors are up to, and podcasts prove a favourite medium for these sometimes less-than-flattering assessments.
But on Joe Rogan’s podcast in January, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg gave Apple’s iPhone some praise, calling it “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time. But he also included the firm had recently “been so off their game in terms of not releasing many innovative things.”
That rebuke, however, is nothing compared to the turbulent relationship between Mr Zuckerberg and fellow tech guru Elon Musk, the two of whom threatened to fight each other in a cage. Musk is also locked in a legal dispute with Sam Altman about founding OpenAI.
