Sam Altman Slams Meta’s Hiring Tactics as ‘Distasteful,’ Says OpenAI Remains Mission-Driven

Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been offering $100 million signing bonuses to OpenAI engineers to tempt them to jump ship.

Sam Altman thinks that Meta poaching at least nine OpenAI employees for Meta’s new superintelligence division is “somewhat distasteful.” Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been offering $100 million signing bonuses to engineers at Altman’s company and elsewhere to entice them to jump ship.

After Zuckerberg revealed who he had hired for “Meta Superintelligence Labs,” which will work on both the Llama models and frontier versions that could surpass human capabilities, the OpenAI CEO sent a company-wide Slack message, as seen by Wired.

He conceded that a “few great people” had joined Meta, but Facebook’s parent company “didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list” of prospects at OpenAI. This echoes what he said on his brother’s podcast last month, that “none ...