"Join Us for a $137 Million Bonus": Meta Lures Away Three ChatGPT Researchers with Record Offer

Meta Plans to Spend About 89 Trillion KRW to Expand AI

Meta Platforms (Meta), the parent company of Facebook, which has joined the artificial intelligence (AI) investment race, has hired three researchers from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, for a large sum.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Photo by AFP

On June 26 (local time), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing sources, reported that Meta had recruited three researchers who had been working at OpenAI's Zurich office in Switzerland. These individuals established OpenAI's Swiss office at the end of last year and were previously colleagues at DeepMind, Google's AI division. This move comes about a week after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, mentioned that although Meta had offered large sums of money to OpenAI employees to entice them to switch companies, none had left. At that time, in mid-June, Sam Altman publicly criticized Meta, stating that the company had offered bonuses of up to $100 million (approximately 136.8 billion KRW) to employees who would join Meta, calling it "insane."

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg has been aggressively pursuing acquisitions and talent recruitment to advance research in the field of superintelligence, a next-generation AI system that surpasses human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI). Previously, in January, Zuckerberg announced plans to spend up to $65 billion (approximately 88.7 trillion KRW) this year to expand AI infrastructure.

Meta also invested $14.3 billion (approximately 19.5 trillion KRW) in the data labeling startup Scale AI and brought in its CEO, Alexander Wang (28). This marks the largest startup investment since Meta's founding. The team also includes Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. In addition, Meta is reportedly in the final stages of negotiations to acquire PlayAI, an AI startup specializing in voice cloning technology.

On June 27, the Financial Times (FT) reported that Meta is seeking to raise a total of $29 billion (approximately 39.5 trillion KRW) to rescue its AI data centers in the United States. It was also reported that Meta is in discussions with private equity firms such as Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and PIMCO to secure capital.