Islamabad, June 18, 2025: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying hard to hire top AI researchers for his team, even offering over $100 million in pay. However, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, these big offers are not working.
As Meta pushes to build advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI), it has tried to lure away key people from other companies. They hired Alexandr Wang from Scale AI to lead their superintelligence team and reportedly offered huge sums to talent at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. For example, OpenAI’s top researcher, Noam Brown, and Google’s AI executive, Koray Kavukcuoglu, were targets but both said no. Meta did manage to hire a few notable names, like Jack Rae from DeepMind and Johan Schalkwyk from Sesame AI.
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Speaking on a podcast, Sam Altman confirmed Meta’s huge offers but said they’ve had little success. He stated, “They’ve started making these giant offers… $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year. I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have taken him up on that.”
Altman believes OpenAI’s focus on its mission is more attractive to top researchers than Meta’s high salaries. He also suggested that Meta isn’t “great at innovation,” implying their money-focused approach lacks what’s needed for major AI breakthroughs.
Meta recently bought a large share in Scale AI and is expanding its AI team while competing fiercely with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. Meanwhile, Altman hinted that OpenAI might create its own AI-powered social media platform, focusing on personalized content. Meta is also trying new things in this area with its Meta AI app, but users seem confused by it so far.
