Zuckerberg reportedly offers $300 million packages to lure OpenAI staff

When Mark Zuckerberg promised to pivot Meta into an “AI-first” company, few in Silicon Valley expected him to mean it quite this literally. But in recent weeks, the Facebook founder has thrown open the doors of the social media giant’s bank vault in a high-stakes recruitment drive that has stunned rivals and rattled the already volatile race for artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

According to Wired, Meta has offered some of the largest pay packages the technology industry has ever seen, in certain cases dangling total compensation deals worth up to $300 million over four years, in a scramble to lure top minds from competitors including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Some offers reportedly front-load more than $100 million in the first year alone, with lucrative perks such as immediately vesting stock and guaranteed access to cutting-edge AI computing hardware.

Mark Zuckerberg.

Not all of these eye-watering sums are uncontested. Several OpenAI researchers have publicly dismissed the figures as overblown, and Meta’s own executives have downplayed the scope of these blockbuster offers, describing them as reserved for a handful of senior leadership roles. But there is no denying the impact. At least 11 prominent researchers have jumped ship to join Meta’s new initiative, Meta Superintelligence Labs, including key architects behind OpenAI’s flagship large language models and Google’s image generation breakthroughs.

At the center of this talent offensive is Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old wunderkind behind Scale AI, who now becomes Meta’s first-ever chief AI officer. Together with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Wang will oversee the Superintelligence Labs.

Zuckerberg has not hesitated to take the battle to his rivals’ front doors. In one telling episode, he personally approached OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new venture, Safe Superintelligence, and is said to have pitched multi-million-dollar offers directly to prospects via WhatsApp.

The aggressive push has not gone unnoticed inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. “It feels as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen told staff, describing the exodus of talent. CEO Sam Altman, speaking on a podcast with his brother, accused Meta of dangling “$100 million signing bonuses” to lure away his best people, a charge Meta’s leadership has dismissed as self-serving spin.

Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, struck a defensive tone in a recent internal meeting, acknowledging that the market for elite AI talent is “hot” but dismissing suggestions of across-the-board mega-offers as hype. Still, he took a jab at OpenAI’s leadership, claiming Altman’s complaints amount to little more than sour grapes: “We are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI.”