ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO claims rival Meta attempted to poach its employees, offered... million bonuses to...

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently alleged that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been making giant offers to his employees to recruit them. His comment comes at a time when the Facebook owner is focusing on building its superintelligence unit amid growing competition in the AI space. However, Meta has not yet responded to the claims as reported by Reuters. 

Altman disclosed on the Uncapped podcast, that Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to his employees, however, none of his ‘best people’ have accepted it.“They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year. So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” he said. He also noted that Meta considers OpenAI as its principal rival in the AI space.

Once deemed as a leader in open-source AI models, Meta has faced staff departures of late. Subsequently, it has been aggressively pushing recruitment to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities in the race to compete with Google, China’s DeepSeek and OpenAI. The tech giant has pushed forward the new open-source AI models. However, it came on board data-labelling startup Scale AI, with an investment of $14.3 billion. He hired its top boss, Alexandr Wang to lead its new superintelligence team.

On the other hand, OpenAI executives are considering accusing Microsoft, their major backer, of anti-competitive behaviour in their partnership. According to the Wall Street Journal, the ChatGPT-maker may seek a federal regulatory review of its contract with Microsoft citing antitrust law violations. Amid ongoing negotiations between the two companies over revising the terms of Microsoft's investment, OpenAI's contention is to transition into a public-benefit corporation, which requires Microsoft's approval. For the unversed, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 to back the startup's development of AI technologies on its Azure cloud platform. Since then, OpenAI has been finding ways to cut down on its dependence on the tech heavyweight.