OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently called Meta’s attempts to poach top AI talent from his company with $100 million signing bonuses “crazy.”
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, says OpenAI has been countering those crazy offers.
Bosworth said in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Friday that Altman “neglected to mention that he’s countering those offers.”
The OpenAI CEO recently disclosed how Meta was offering massive signing bonuses to his employees during an interview on his brother’s podcast, “Uncapped with Jack Altman.”
The executive said “none of our best people” had taken Meta’s offers, but he didn’t say whether OpenAI countered the signing bonuses to retain those top employees.
OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
The Meta CTO said these large signing bonuses are a sign of the market setting a rate for top AI talent.
“The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,” Bosworth said. “But that is a great credit to these individuals who, five or six years ago, put their head down and decided to spend their time on a then-unproven technology which they pioneered and have established themselves as a relatively small pool of people who can command incredible market premium for the talent they’ve raised.”
Meta, on June 12, announced that it had bought a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data company, for $14.8 billion as the social media company continues its artificial intelligence development.
Business Insider’s chief media and tech correspondent Peter Kafka noted that the move appears to be an expensive acquihire of Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, and some of the data company’s top executives.
Bosworth told CNBC that the large offers for AI talent will encourage others to build their expertise and, as a result, the numbers will look different in a couple of years.
“But today, it’s a relatively small number and I think they’ve earned it,” he said.
