Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staffers $100M bonuses

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/altman-says-meta-offered-openai-staffers-100-million-bonuses

by EvgeniyZh • 1 year ago

91 114 1 year ago

A_D_E_P_T• 1 year ago

"Up to"

Still, though, as far as I know that kind of hiring bonus is unheard of. Surely Deepseek and Google have shown that the skills of OpenAI employees are not unique, so this must be part of an effort to cripple OpenAI by poaching their best employees.

oersted2• 1 year ago

They are world-class engineers of course, but it's always been clear OpenAI's core-advantage was simply the access to massive amounts capital without much expectation of a return on investment.

The ML methods they use have always been quite standard, they have been open about that. They just had the gall (or vision) to burn way more money than anyone else on scaling them up. The scale itself carries its own serious engineering challenges of course, but frankly they are not doing anything that any top-of-class CS post-grad couldn't replicate with enough budget.

It's certainly hard, but it's really not that special from an engineering standpoint. What is absolutely unprecedented is the social engineering and political acumen that allowed them to take such risks with so much money, walking that tightrope of mad ambition combined with good scientific discipline to make sure the money wouldn't be completely wasted, and the vision for what was required to make LLMs actually commercially useful (instruction tuning, "safety/censoring"...). But frankly, I really think most of the the engineers themselves are fungible, and I say this as an engineer myself.

daquisu• 1 year ago

That is a common narrative but Google had LaMDA as an LLM with over 100B parameters before the ChatGPT release. There was even a Xoogler that claimed it was alive.

From my POV Google could have released a good B2C LLM before OpenAI, but it would compete with their own Ads business.

cs02rm0• 1 year ago

The job market in software seems crazy to me at the moment. It's becoming all or nothing.

v5v33• 1 year ago

Only for the top 1% of AI talent. As it is a limited pool.

anshumankmr• 1 year ago

Well idk... recruiters from orgs have been really active in reaching out off late, anecdotally speaking, but I would not say I am the top1% of AI talent.

namblooc• 1 year ago

I was never involved in doing ML myself, even through my CS studies. However, from the outside it looks... not that complicated? How do they justify these salaries? Where do they see it coming back to them in terms of revenue?

suyash• 1 year ago

I can confirm first hand.

diziet• 1 year ago

Whether this is true or not, this is a clever move to publicize. Anyone being poached by Meta now from OpenAI will feel like asking for 100m bonuses and will possibly feel underappreciated with only a 20 or 50 million signing bonus.

kasperni• 1 year ago

Yeah, and everyone will know you did it for the money.

willvarfar2• 1 year ago

Isn't pretty much everyone working at OpenAI already clearly motivated by money over principle? OpenAI had a very public departure from being for-good to being for-money last year...

gadders2• 1 year ago

Imagine!! I would never live down the humiliation of getting a $100m signing bonus (I'd really like the opportunity to try though).

loose-cannon• 1 year ago

As opposed to?

StefanBatory• 1 year ago

I think most of us work for money ;)

pjc504• 1 year ago

This isn't punk, nobody cares if you're a ""sellout"".

lm28469• 1 year ago

Are people sacrificing 40 hours of their lives every week to mega corps for anything other than money???

PunchTornado• 1 year ago

20 mil is peanuts. who would accept it?

randomcarbloke• 1 year ago

I would, where do I sign

cess11• 1 year ago

It's like twelve life incomes in the US.

    > 20000000 / (40 * 40000)
    12.5

An obscene amount of wealth.

bloqs• 1 year ago

people not completely out of touch with reality

gondo• 1 year ago

This can backfire and work the other way around. Existing employees may try to renegotiate their compensation and threaten to leave.

v5v33• 1 year ago

He said "none of our best people have left" which means some are leaving.

And OpenAi probably had to renegotiate with those with a $100m offer so their costs went up.

Suppose it is karma for Zuckerberg, Meta have abused privacy so much many dislike them and won't work for them out of principle.

martin_a• 1 year ago

And OpenAi probably had to renegotiate with those with a $100m offer so their costs went up.

That sounds like the actual move here. Exploding your competitors cost structure because you're said to pay insane amounts of money for people willing to change...

On the other hand: People talk. If Meta will not pay that money that talk would probably go around...

drexlspivey• 1 year ago

They will just give them more equity which costs nothing

highwaylights• 1 year ago

Following this logic if Meta had been offering this money and stop doing so going forward, this article is pretty good cover for reigning those costs in (if they wanted to).

aleph_minus_one3• 1 year ago

He said "none of our best people have left" which means some are leaving.

If you define "best" as "not willing to leave", the statement "none of our best people have left" is actually near to a tautology. :-)

pu_pe• 1 year ago

Raising the bar for salaries to be so high creates a huge moat for all these massive companies. Meta and OpenAI can afford to pay $100M for 10-20 top employees, but that would consume the entire initial funding round for startups such as Superintelligence from Ilya Sustskever, who raised $2 billion.

PlunderBunny• 1 year ago

Which is what these companies want [0]. So, if you don't have a moat, build one!

[0] https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...

d--b• 1 year ago

Whatever Altman says can't be trusted.

Sol-• 1 year ago

I think money and the promise of resources will convince enough qualified people to join Meta, but I guess it doesn't help their recruiting efforts that Zuck seems to have the most dystopian and anti-human AGI vision of all the company heads.

Of course we have good reasons to be cynical about Sam Altman or Anthropic's Dario Amodei, but at least their public statements and blog posts pretend to envision a positive future where humanity is empowered. They might bring about ruinous disruption that humanity won't recover from while trying to do that, but at least they claim to care.

What is Zuckerberg's vision? AI generated friends for which there is a "demand" (because their social networks pivoted away from connecting humans) and genAI advertising to more easily hack people's reward centers.

MaxPock2• 1 year ago

I think Dario has the most dystopian and anti people AI vision

edanm• 1 year ago

What makes you say that?

kgh1337• 1 year ago

Any provable confirmation here around?

viking123• 1 year ago

I think the real breakthroughs will come from some randos or some researchers, not sure if throwing huge amounts of money to something is always the solution, otherwise many diseases would have been dealt with already.

spookie• 1 year ago

Yup, also somebody with a completely different perspective, not tainted by biases stemming from the wrong incentives.

jsnell• 1 year ago

I thought that the report that was being screenshotted a few weeks ago on the relative movements of staff between the top AI labs[0] would make for a good companion data point. Except now that I look at it, Meta didn't even make it to the graph :-/

[0] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...

Maro2• 1 year ago

I feel like there's a lot of half-truths in the article and some of the comments here.

1. The $100M is a huge number. Maybe there was 1 person, working on large-scale training or finetuning, who had an offer like this, which surely was a high offer even in base (like let's say $1M+), and had a lot of stock and bonus clauses, which over 4+ years could have worked out to a big number. But I don't believe that the average SWE or DE ("staffer") working on the OpenAI ChatGPT UI Javascript would get this offer..

2. One of the comments here says "[Zuck] has mediocre talent". I worked at Facebook ~10 years ago, it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure it's still an impressive set of people overall.

Disclaimer: I don't work in the LLM space, not even in the US tech space anymore.

leosanchez• 1 year ago

"[Zuck] has mediocre talent"

I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.

amy_petrik3• 1 year ago

"[Zuck] has mediocre talent"I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.

I know Zuck personally and this is one of the big understandings to do with him. If you adjust his selector switch (just below the 3rd rib-like component on the pseudo thorax) to "science and engineering", you'll find he's the most brilliant guy ever, like Data from Star Trek! But this mode consumes some CPU cycles normally spent on hu-man interactions so he can come off as awkward.

A year or two back we switched it to "JW" (Jack Welch) and a sticky-fingered unix programmer spilled diet mountain dew all over the switch, it's been stuck there ever sense, hence here we are, hence the reputation for no-talent. It's there we just have to figure out how to get that switch jarred loose.

benrapscallion• 1 year ago

They did “pay” $14B to the CEO of ScaleAI. $100M sounds plausible, relatively.

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

Is it just me, or does Mr. Wang give grifter/charleton vibes. Like I get you don't hand 14bb and positions like this to 28 year olds for nothing. He seems like a really good salesperson mostly, which sometimes give me pause. However, I'm sure Meta needs excellent sales people... for 14bb though? Like did Meta really need labeling/training infra? Idk, the whole deal is weird to me.

tyleo• 1 year ago

Comments aimed at Zuck’s talent always seem jealous to me. An argument can be made that he lacks a good moral compass using specific public examples but I haven’t seen any similar evidence to argue a lack of talent.

I also know many folks who’ve worked at Meta. Almost all of them are talented despite many working there regretfully.

StochasticLi• 1 year ago

OpenAI has very few employees, so I think it's possible for the correct ones. Crazier things have happened.

poisonborz• 1 year ago

It's incredible to me that talent != moral values is this widespread. I know this was pre-Cambridge Analytica but the writing was on the wall, and we see the same with each new tech wave.

Whenever I ask such people, they talk about the incredible perks, stock options, challenges. They do say they are overburdened though.

These are people who would be rich anyway, and could work anywhere, doing much more good.

spacemadness• 1 year ago

They’re people who would have been on wall street in another era a lot of the time. Smart people focused on money.

freejazz4• 1 year ago

it was the highest concentration of talent

What a waste of a generation

brg• 1 year ago

Re: Mark. I agree. It surprised me to no end that he knew the staffing and open headcount of every team. I was a manager for most of my tenure, but his interactions with Lars, Chris and others were always insightful enlightening.

benhurmarcel3• 1 year ago

it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life

And yet they don’t have much to show for it.

clpm4j• 1 year ago

aside from a $1.75 trillion market cap

Maro2• 1 year ago

3B people use the products daily for an hour on average. FB products are the primary way these people communicate with their friends & families online.

pjc504• 1 year ago

This is software developing a transfer market like footballers, isn't it? We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.

In both cases this is driven by "tournament wages": you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers, because the size of your team is limited and the important metric is beating the other team.

It's also interesting to contrast this with the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric. It sounds like the compensation curve is going to get steeper and steeper.

blagie• 1 year ago

The curve is getting steeper, yes. That's not a contrast to the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric.

Steeper means: higher at the top. Lower on the bottom.

Right now, AI can do the job of the bottom large percentage of programmers better than those programmers. Look up how a disruptive S-curve works. At the end, we may be left with one programmer overseeing an AI "improving" itself. Or perhaps zero. Or perhaps one per project. We don't know yet.

Good analogue is automation. Mass-scale manufacturing jobs were replaced by a handful of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs. Certain career classes disappeared entirely.

dachworker• 1 year ago

The "I trained a trillion parameter model" club is a very small club.

lotsofpulp• 1 year ago

We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.

Pretty sure Alexsandr Wang just blew Ronaldo out of the water.

Before that, the WhatsApp/Instagram founders.

triceratops2• 1 year ago

you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers

Of course you can. It's a team game. Having Ronaldo wearing your team's shirt doesn't guarantee a win. So a team of 11 cheaper footballers with a better plan and coaching has often beat whatever team Ronaldo plays on. "Cheaper" != "cheap" of course; they're still immensely talented and well-paid athletes.

pjc504• 1 year ago

What I mean is there's only eleven slots on the field. You can't swap one star player for a hundred mediocre ones. It's worth seeing which industries do and don't work like that.

quirtenus• 1 year ago

Sam Altman is a sociopath who seems to desire only power. He plays teams against each other at the same company. He backstabs people. He lies. He betrays people. He knows how to push levers and exploit relationships and normal human behavior.

I'm disappointed how many people here are accepting it so non-critically. It could be true, but for me, it's very difficult to believe. Are OpenAI staffers really telling Sam Altman what their offers are?

From Bayes' theorem it is much simpler to assume, Sam is lying to burnish the reputation of his company, as he does every week. From a manipulation point of view, it's perfect. Meta won't contradict it, and nobody from OpenAI can contradict it. It hinders Meta's ability to negotiate because engineers will expect more. It makes OpenAI look great -- wow, everyone loves the company so much that they can't be bought off -- and of course he sneaks in a little revenge jab at the end, he just had to say that, of course, "all the good people stayed". He is disgustingly good at these double meanings, statements that appear innocuous but are actually not.

MaxPock2• 1 year ago

Atlman doesn't get paid and does AI because he loves it . Of course he would never lie https://youtube.com/shorts/XzqqzcpmtTw?si=vIusneDF3IkvjCEF

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Being the truth engine for sites like reddit is much more valuable than money

an0malous• 1 year ago

Is there any reason to think he’s not just lying? His entire track record is riddled with dishonesty, about OpenAI’s mission, about the capabilities of their next AI model, about his own role and financial incentives.

lucubratory• 1 year ago

Man did I get some pushback when I said this a week ago. People just really don't want to believe the sums involved here.

jrsj• 1 year ago

Altman really is a generational bullshit artist. Exaggerating the value of his talent while pretending he hasn't already lost a lot of his most valuable people (he has).

It makes sense he focuses on Meta in this interview -- his other competitors actually have taken some of his top talent and are producing better models than GPT now.

yalogin• 1 year ago

So is 10s of million a common sign on bonus for individual contributors in the AI space?

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

$100m for a staff member sounds crazy, but on the other hand if they were hired before ChatGPT was released and they got stock options still vesting, you might need to compensate them a 100m just for losing their stock.

staticman2• 1 year ago

I see no reason to believe anything Altman says, but food for thought:

Is it possible such a bonus, if it exists, would be contingent on Meta inventing AGI within a certain number of years, for some definition of AGI? Or possibly would have some other very ambitious performance metric for advancing the technology?

karmakaze• 1 year ago

If I were one of the targeted, I'd probably take it as a learning opportunity. Doesn't Yann LeCun work there as the VP and Chief AI Scientist? I don't know many others doing much research other than monetizing LLMs. DeepMind by far would be my (uninformed) first choice.

As for ethics, Meta/FB is disliked but they seem pretty transparent compared to OpenAI [sic].

neonate• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/PrRvH

zw123456• 1 year ago

Simple hack for Sam. Hire a bunch of people for some nominal amount. They do not have to do anything and they know nothing about AI. Then let Zuck waste his wad paying out signing bonuses to fake employees.

Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staffers $100M bonuses

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