AI talent war: Meta spends $100 million to hunt for OpenAI people

(Dan Tri) - Amid the global artificial intelligence fever, the giant Meta is using a powerful "trick" to attract talent from OpenAI - the toughest competitor in the AI race. But is money enough to buy talent?

In a development that stunned the tech world, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta - Facebook's parent company run by Mark Zuckerberg - offered recruiting bonuses of up to $100 million to "entice" OpenAI's top AI experts.

“It’s crazy,” Altman said on the “Uncapped” podcast, hosted by his brother, Joel Altman. “They started offering a lot of our team really big deals—$100 million signing bonuses, plus annual salaries that were way higher than that. But at least so far, none of our best people have agreed to leave OpenAI for Meta.”

Meta spends a lot of money to create super intelligence

Meta recently announced plans to invest up to $15 billion to develop a team of "superintelligence" - AI that can surpass humans in all fields. To realize that ambition, Mark Zuckerberg personally participated in recruiting, not afraid to pour money into buying companies and recruiting AI "stars" around the world .

Last week, Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a startup that specializes in training data for AI, and recruited the company's young CEO Alexandr Wang to work for its superintelligence team.

Not stopping there, Meta is also said to have “gutted” large technology corporations such as Google DeepMind. According to Bloomberg, one of the prominent experts recruited is Dr. Jack Rae, a veteran researcher at DeepMind.

Zuckerberg once announced that Meta will spend up to 65 billion USD this year to serve AI ambitions (Photo: pymnts.com).

AI talent is being hunted like gold

The battle for AI talent is intensifying as artificial intelligence becomes an important strategic weapon not only for technology companies but also for governments and investors.

“The war for AI talent has become ridiculous,” Menlo Ventures investor Deedy Das once said on X (Twitter). He said Meta is willing to spend up to $2 million a year to attract staff, but still continuously fails to compete with big competitors such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

A recent report from The Information shows that the company Anthropic, founded by engineers who left OpenAI, is also “sucking blood” from OpenAI and DeepMind.

Why hasn't OpenAI "lost people" yet?

Despite being bombarded with offers worth tens of millions of dollars from Meta, CEO Sam Altman believes that what retains talent is not money, but OpenAI's work culture and mission.

“I respect Meta for some things, but I don’t think they’re a good innovation company,” Altman said. He also warned that if you just spend money to hire people without being clear about what they’re going to do or for what purpose, it’s hard to build a good, sustainable culture.

“The strategy of throwing huge compensation at the beginning without emphasizing the role or reason for the job’s existence, in my opinion, leads companies in the wrong direction,” says Altman.

According to Altman, OpenAI understands “a lot of things that Meta doesn’t,” especially how to maintain its original mission while scaling and commercializing AI.

Sam Altman said Meta's generous offers of more than $100 million for OpenAI staff failed because top talent still valued the company's corporate culture and leadership in artificial intelligence (Photo: Getty).

The AI fever is not over yet

Not only is talent being competed for, but AI hardware is also becoming a new gold mine. According to the Carlyle Group, total investment in AI computing power could reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, larger than Australia’s annual GDP.

Some companies even buy startups just to “tie down” the founders and talented engineers. Google spent $2.7 billion to buy Character.AI - a company founded by Noam Shazeer, who co-authored the legendary study “Attention Is All You Need” that gave birth to the modern generation of language AI.

Once known as a non-profit startup, OpenAI has now become an equal competitor to Meta in the global AI race. However, Altman said that even though Meta has a lot of money, that does not necessarily guarantee victory.

“I’ve heard that Meta sees us as their biggest competitor. I respect their drive and their willingness to try,” Altman said. “But just as Facebook realized that Google’s social efforts were going nowhere, I think we now see Meta in the AI race in a similar light.”

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/kinh-doanh/cuoc-chien-nhan-tai-ai-meta-chi-100-trieu-usd-san-nguoi-openai-20250618232924937.htm