Athira Sethu
Kochi, 18 June 2025
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently mentioned that Meta (Facebook promoter) is giving massive bonuses in an attempt to poach his staff. Altman says some of his staff were presented with signing bonuses of approximately $100 million, as well as extremely high annual salaries. He made this revelation on a podcast run by his brother.
These large offers indicate how keen the competition among tech firms is to recruit top artificial intelligence (AI) minds. There’s presently a huge pressure to discover and retain top AI talent. Firms think that it takes one great engineer to make a huge difference, much like a star athlete can turn a game around.
Meta, which previously dominated open-source AI (free-to-use AI software), is also struggling to catch up. It has launched a new “superintelligence” team, which is a group dedicated to creating the most capable AI systems. Meta has recently paid $14.3 billion to make an investment in a firm named Scale AI, which assists in labeling data for AI training. Meta also recruited Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, to head this new team.
Despite these efforts, Altman said that none of OpenAI’s top employees have accepted Meta’s offers — at least not yet. He also mentioned that Meta likely sees OpenAI as its biggest rival in the AI space.
This points to how intense the race has gotten between tech giants such as Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others. They all want to create the best AI, and they are willing to pay millions of dollars to acquire the individuals who can assist them in doing that.
In plain language, tech firms are vying for AI talent. Meta is throwing enormous amounts of money to poach OpenAI staff, but OpenAI’s best employees remain loyal for now. The war over AI talent just gets more fierce.
