Meta offers $100 million to OpenAI employees for switching. 4 have already accepted
The rumours were confirmed: four leading OpenAI specialists joined the Facebook team - Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren - and now work in the superintelligence department at Meta.
Zhao is a deep learning expert who worked on GPT-4; Ren is responsible for the post-training stages of o3/o4 models; Yu and Bi are multi-domain AI specialists.
What caused a resonance
Alongside the downsizing of some departments (e.g. moderation), Meta is actively building up its team for the superintelligence project. Currently lagging behind its main competitors, Meta's shareholders are demanding that the company speed up the development of its own artificial intelligence. As a result, there have been numerous reports that Meta is offering $100 million to OpenAI employees for joining the company.
Meta partially denies the large payments: according to CTO Andrew Bosworth, such bonuses were offered only to certain high-ranking officials, not on a massive scale. Some defectors also reported that they did not receive 100 million.
The context of the war for talent
A real talent race is unfolding:
In addition to OpenAI, Meta is actively hiring from DeepMind, Scale AI, and other competitors - it has even formed a separate list of top researchers it wants to lure.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accuses Meta of "aggressive involvement" with financial incentives, which allegedly harms the culture of innovation. But Meta responds by saying that these are the laws of the market, and that talented employees are looking for a place where their skills are appreciated.
What's next.
Meta has taken the development of its AI division seriously. Having the world's largest social network and several other world-class services at its disposal, Meta will benefit from such development both by saving on its own processes and by developing a completely independent product, as it has its own huge training base.
At the same time, it is very difficult for an independent OpenAI to deal with such threats. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other huge corporations have huge financial resources that OpenAI cannot afford. ChatGPT is currently one of the strongest products on the market, but this niche has actually just been born and is developing at a huge pace. It would be a shame if OpenAI, like dozens of other pioneers, fails to keep up with the pace and loses the market.
Source: www.wired.com
