- Sam Altman is fighting back after Meta recruited a string of top OpenAI researchers, accusing the tech giant of acting “in a way that feels somewhat distasteful.” In a sharply worded internal message to staff, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed Meta was settling for second-tier hires, rather than some of the “top people” it had tried to poach.
Sam Altman is pushing back on Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive AI recruitment drive after the Big Tech company poached several key researchers from OpenAI.
In a message to staff that was reviewed by Wired, Altman said that while Meta had recruited some “great people,” the company had failed to hire their “top people and had to go quite far down their list” when hiring for the company’s new Superintelligence team.
He told employees that Meta had been trying to poach OpenAI’s talent for a “super long time,” adding he’d “lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist.”
An initial list of hires for Meta’s new team, which was made public on Monday, included several prominent former OpenAI researchers, such as Trapit Bansal, the cocreator of o-series models at OpenAI, and Shuchao Bi, cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. The Big Tech company also scooped up Hongyu Ren, who previously led a group for post-training at OpenAI; Jiahui Yu, who previously led the perception team at OpenAI; and Shengjia Zhao, who previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.
Meta’s stock hit a record high in response to the news, with shares closing Monday at a record $738.09, marking a 23% year-to-date gain.
Altman wrote in his Slack message that “Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful,” adding he assumed “things will get even crazier in the future.” He went on to hint that the company was reassessing compensation for research staffers.
The CEO also doubled down on his faith that OpenAI would ultimately come out on top, telling staff there was “much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock.”
“What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it’s very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target,” he wrote.
AI talent war
The war for AI talent is becoming increasingly fierce as top labs vie for an increasingly small pool of top talent.
Meta has been particularly aggressive in recent months, picking up employees from almost all of its main rivals including key architects of ChatGPT as well as those of Google’s Gemini and its image-gen tech. The company also has a new Chief AI Officer in Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI.
Wang recently joined the company as part of a deal that saw Meta investing up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in the training data company.
Altman has previously bristled at Meta’s recruitment efforts. On a recent episode of Uncapped, Altman said that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.” Meta has internally disputed the figure.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune, made outside normal working hours.
