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Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staffers $100M bonuses
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agohttps://archive.ph/7lvlj https://archive.ph/7lvlj "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.
- oersted 1y agoThey 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 1y agoThat 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.
- oersted 1y agoTrue, actually people forget that quite good LLMs existed 2-3 years before ChatGPT, from Google, Microsoft, Facebook… OpenAI itself open-sourced GPT-2 all the way back in 2019 and had a GPT-3 API service for years before ChatGPT. The breakthrough that ChatGPT brought was not technical, but the foresight to bet on laborious human-feedback fine-tuning to make LLMs somewhat controllable and practical. All those previous LLMs where mostly as “intelligent” as the GPT-3.5 that ChatGPT was built on, but they hallucinated so much, and it was so easy to manipulate them to be horribly racist and such. They remained niche tech demos until OpenAI trained them, not with new tech really, just the right vision and lots of expensive experimentation.
- cs02rm0 1y agoThe job market in software seems crazy to me at the moment. It's becoming all or nothing.
- v5v3 1y agoOnly for the top 1% of AI talent. As it is a limited pool.
- anshumankmr 1y agoWell 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 1y agoI 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?
- psb217 1y agoMost of the people pursued in these "AI talent wars" are folks deeply involved in training or developing infrastructure for training LLMs at whatever level is currently state-of-the-art. Due to the resources required for projects that can provide this sort of experience, the pool of folks with this experience is limited to those with significant clout in orgs with money to burn on LLM projects. These people are expensive to hire, and can kind of run through a loop of jumping from company to company in an upward compensation spiral. Ie, the skills aren't particularly complicated in principle, but the conditions needed to acquire them aren't widely available, so the pool of people with the skills is limited.
- impossiblefork 1y agoIt both is and isn't. But finding genuinely new things that actually work better is very difficult.
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- diziet 1y agoWhether 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 1y agoYeah, and everyone will know you did it for the money.
- willvarfar 1y agoIsn'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...
- gadders 1y agoEveryone works for money unless you are refusing to take your salary.
- dan-robertson 1y agoLots of people working for AI labs have other AI labs they could work for, so their decisions will be made based on differences of remuneration, expected work/role, location, and employer culture/mission. The claim above is that OpenAI loses to other labs on most of the metrics (obviously depends on the person) and so many researchers have gone there based on higher compensation.
- Retric 1y agoNot what the phrase means, when you decide to take a vastly less lucrative offer you’re working for something other than money.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
- v5v3 1y agoHe 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 1y 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 1y agoThey will just give them more equity which costs nothing
- twoodfin 1y agoI am nearly certain that’s not how Zuckerberg thinks about equity. You also have to publicly account for RSU’s to the market just like any other expense.
- v5v3 1y agoThis is an offer made 2 year ago to someone: >Base salary: $250,000 Stock: worth of $1,500,000 over 4 years Total comp projected to cross $1M/year https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zhengyudian_jobsearch-founderjourney-techcareers-activity-7335730766049390592-IKSy https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zhengyudian_jobsearch-founder... https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/meta_offers_10m_ai_researcher/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/meta_offers_10m_ai_re...
- tasuki 1y agoHuh? Equity costs a lot. It's diluting existing shareholders, ie Zuck.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pu_pe 1y agoRaising 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 1y agoWhich 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-and-neither/ https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...
- d--b 1y agoWhatever Altman says can't be trusted.
- lvl155 1y ago[flagged]
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y agoYou answered your own question :) !
- nikanj 1y agoMan, I wish I also had that sort of mediocre talent. What has he achieved in his career anyway?
- Coffeewine 1y agoPlus when you have the kind of money that Zuck has, buying your way out of everything seems to work pretty well.
- ramraj07 1y agoWhat an idiot indeed, buying useless companies like whatsapp and Instagram. Where did that take the org. His stupidity shows clearly - the arrogance to think social media could be monetized. Look at that stupidly low sum of a few hundred billion in revenue. Laughable.
- dang 1y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- absoluteunit1 1y agoThis has to be rage bait lol
- dang 1y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack, fulminate, or call names on HN. All that is against the site guidelines and, more importantly, the intended spirit of HN. You may not owe $billionaire-celebrity better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Sol- 1y agoI 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.
- kgh1337 1y agoAny provable confirmation here around?
- viking123 1y agoI 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 1y agoYup, also somebody with a completely different perspective, not tainted by biases stemming from the wrong incentives.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jsnell 1y agoI 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-report-2025 https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...
- Maro 1y agoI 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 1y ago> "[Zuck] has mediocre talent" I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amy_petrik 1y 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 1y agoThey did “pay” $14B to the CEO of ScaleAI. $100M sounds plausible, relatively.
- pjc50 1y agoThis 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThe "I trained a trillion parameter model" club is a very small club.
- lotsofpulp 1y 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.
- triceratops 1y 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.
- quirtenus 1y agoSam 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.
- MaxPock 1y agoAtlman doesn't get paid and does AI because he loves it . Of course he would never lie https://youtube.com/shorts/XzqqzcpmtTw?si=vIusneDF3IkvjCEF https://youtube.com/shorts/XzqqzcpmtTw?si=vIusneDF3IkvjCEF
- neuroelectron 1y agoBeing the truth engine for sites like reddit is much more valuable than money
- lucubratory 1y agoMan did I get some pushback when I said this a week ago. People just really don't want to believe the sums involved here.
- an0malous 1y agoIs 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.
- jrsj 1y agoAltman 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 1y agoSo is 10s of million a common sign on bonus for individual contributors in the AI space?
- wodenokoto 1y 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoIf 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 1y agohttps://archive.ph/PrRvH https://archive.ph/PrRvH
- zw123456 1y agoSimple 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.