In the last few months, Meta has been poaching AI researchers left and right to its superintelligence lab by paying them hefty “signing bonuses”, which some say amount to $100 million.
However, this might not be the case. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Lucas Beyer, who is currently working at OpenAI and will soon join Meta, says that the $100 million sign-up bonus is “fake news.” Beyer also confirmed that he will be joined by Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, who are currently working at OpenAI.
Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta was trying to poach AI researchers from his company by offering them bonuses of $100 million. In a podcast hosted by OpenAI, Altman claimed that “Meta started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team” and that “at least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
hey all, couple quick notes:
1) yes, we will be joining Meta.
2) no, we did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news.Excited about what’s ahead though, will share more in due time!
cc @__kolesnikov__ and @XiaohuaZhai.
— Lucas Beyer (bl16) (@giffmana) June 26, 2025
According to a report by The Verge, when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked about the “$100 million signing bonuses”, he said, “Sam is just being dishonest here. He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for every single person…Look, you guys, the market’s hot. It’s not that hot.” Bosworth added that Altman is trying to counter all these offers and that it “is not the general thing that’s happening in the AI space.” The Meta CEO went on to say that there are a couple of more people joining the company, but declined to share details.
However, Bosworth wasn’t the only Meta executive to mention OpenAI at the internal meeting. CPO Chris Cox said that instead of building a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot that helps people with things like writing work emails, Meta wants to differentiate its AI offerings by focusing “on entertainment, on connection with friends, on how people live their lives.”
Compared to Google and OpenAI, Meta is finding it hard to compete in the AI race. However, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company recently built its superintelligence team and is on a hiring spree. Recently, Meta purchased a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI and hired its 28 year old CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its newly formed team.
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