The co-founder and CEO of AI pioneer OpenAI has publicly complained about a rival seeking to poach his staff, by offering ‘crazy’ sign-on bonuses.

The Guardian reported that OpenAI’s Sam Altman used a podcast on Tuesday to allege that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms has tried to poach his top artificial intelligence (AI) experts with “crazy” signing bonuses of $100m (£74m).

Altman’s claim of Meta offering eye watering signing-on bonus, plus a lucrative compensation package, underlines the pressing need among tech giants to bring the needed AI skills inhouse in order to help achieve their AI ambitions.

Sign-on bonuses

In August 2024 IDC research for Expereo had revealed that businesses around the world were being held back from implementing their AI plans in full due to AI skills shortages, coupled with governance challenges.

The Guardian has now reported on Sam Altman claim about Meta’s offers, which have not been confirmed by Meta itself.

OpenAI reportedly said it had nothing to add beyond its chief executive’s comments.

“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team – $100m signing bonuses, more than that comp [compensation] per year,” Altman told the Uncapped podcast, which is presented by his brother, Jack. “It is crazy. I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”

“I think the strategy of a tonne of upfront, guaranteed comp, and that being the reason you tell someone to join … the degree to which they’re focusing on that, and not the work and not the mission – I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,” Altman was quoted as saying.

While Meta was founded as a social media company and OpenAI as non-profit – becoming a for-profit business last year – the two are now rivals, the Guardian reported. Altman told the podcast that he did not feel Meta would succeed in it’s AI push, adding: “I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.”

He said he had once heard Zuckerberg say that it had seemed rational for Google to try to develop a social media function in the early days of Facebook, but “it was clear to people at Facebook that that was not going to work”.

“I feel a little bit similar here,” Altman reportedly added.

Despite the huge investments in the sector, Altman suggested the result could be “we build legitimate super intelligence, and it doesn’t make the world much better [and] doesn’t change things as much as it sounds like it should”.

“The fact that you can have this thing do this amazing stuff for you, and you kind of live your life the same way you did two years ago,” Altman was quoted as saying.

“The thing that I think will be the most impactful in that five to 10-year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science,” Altman reportedly said. “This is a crazy claim to make, but I think it is true, and if it is correct, then over time I think that will dwarf everything else [AI has achieved].”

Super Intelligence

Meta has been heavily investing in AI for some time now, and it indicated in January that it planned to increase its spending on AI infrastructure by up to $65bn in 2025.

Last month the firm said its Meta AI chatbot assistant had risen to one billion monthly active users, boosted by its reach across Meta’s social media services.

Then in June Meta confirmed earlier reports and brought a large stake in Scale AI after it made a $14.3bn (£10.6bn) investment in the firm.

Meta also poached its founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang (and a small number of other Scale staff), to join a Meta team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant.

Computerised “super-intelligence” is a type of AI that can perform better than humans at all tasks.

And it is not just Meta that is poach AI staff.

In March 2024 for example, Microsoft paid AI firm Inflection some $650 million (£516m) after it hired the start-up’s co-founders, as well as most of its staff, as well as licensing its technology.

Microsoft also hired Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection.

In August 2024 Google spent $2.7bn on a deal with Character.AI to use its large language model (LLM) technology, and also poached Character.AI co-founder and chief executive Noam Shazeer.

AI talent wars

Meanwhile a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Deedy Das, weighed in Meta’s hiring bonuses in a series of tweets on X (formerly Twitter).

Last week Das had also tweeted that “the AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous”. Das noted that Meta had been losing AI candidates to rivals despite offering $2m-a-year salaries.

Meta is currently offering $2M+/yr in offers for AI talent and still losing them to OpenAI and Anthropic. Heard ~3 such cases this week.

The AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous.

Today, Anthropic has the highest ~80% retention 2 years in and is the #1 (large) company top AI… pic.twitter.com/YSv5UNV5H2

— Deedy (@deedydas) June 10, 2025

Meanwhile last month it was reported Anthropic was “siphoning top talent from two of its biggest rivals: OpenAI and DeepMind”.