Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claimed on June 17 (local time) that Meta tried to poach his company's employees by offering them a $100 million (approximately 137.2 billion KRW) bonus.
According to Bloomberg and TechCrunch, Altman said on a podcast hosted by his brother that "Meta started making huge offers to our team members."
Altman stated, "The $100 million is like a signing bonus, and the total compensation would be even higher when you include salary," adding, "So far, not a single one of our top talents has accepted their offer."
He also mentioned, "I heard that Meta considers us their biggest competitor."
In fact, Meta reportedly attempted to recruit Noam Brown, a senior researcher at OpenAI, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Google DeepMind, but was unsuccessful.
Altman commented on his employees turning down Meta's offers, saying, "I respect Meta as a company, but I do not think they are excellent at innovation," and pointed out the cultural risk of creating jobs where money could become more important than the work itself.
Meta was once a leader in the open-source AI model field, but has struggled due to employee departures. Recently, the company invested $14.3 billion in the data labeling startup Scale AI and recruited CEO Alexandr Wang, accelerating its efforts to attract AI talent. Meta also hired Jack Rae, a senior researcher from Google DeepMind.
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