Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staff $100 million bonuses, as Mark Zuckerberg ramps up AI poaching efforts
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta Platforms tried to poach OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said.
While Meta had sought to hire “a lot of people” from OpenAI, “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said, speaking on the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother.
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” he said. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The Meta CEO is personally trying to assemble a top artificial intelligence team for its “superintelligence” AI lab and has invested heavily in AI through its Meta AI research division, which also oversees its Llama series of open-source large language models.
The moves come after Meta had once again delayed the release of its latest flagship AI model due to concerns about its capabilities, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, sources have previously told CNBC that Zuckerberg has become so frustrated with Meta’s standing in AI that he’s willing to invest billions in top talent.
Last week Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, announced he was leaving for Meta as part of a deal that saw the Facebook parent dish out $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in the AI startup. Wang added that a small number of Scale AI employees would also join Meta as part of the agreement.
The Times had previously reported that Wang would head a research lab pursuing “superintelligence,” an AI system that surpasses human intelligence.
The company has also recently poached other top talent, including Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report added that Zuckerberg had been directly involved with the recruitment efforts.
Speaking on the podcast, which was released on Tuesday, Altman said that Meta’s strategy of offering a large, upfront, guaranteed compensation would detract from the actual work and not set up a winning culture.
“I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying ‘we’re just going to try to copy OpenAI,'” he added. “That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate.”
However, spending big on startups and their talent is nothing new to the AI space. Former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive joined OpenAI after the company acquired Ive’s AI devices startup io through a $6.4 billion all-equity deal last month.
Some tech analysts have also pushed back against the notion that Meta has been missing the mark on AI.
“They basically built the rails for open source AI development, and so much of what is happening in AI is being built on Meta,” Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum Group, told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” last week.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. Llama’s open-source characteristics have allowed many third-party applications to be built on top of it.
Newman added that Meta’s massive investments, such as in ScaleAI, will continue to push it forward in training its behemoth models.
An Electron rocket launches the Baby Come Back mission from New Zealand on July 17, 2023.
Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab stock soared 8% Monday, building on a strong run fueled by space innovation.
Shares of the space infrastructure company have nearly doubled over the last two months following a slew of successful launches and a deal with the European Union.
The stock is up 63% year to date after surging nearly sixfold in 2024.
Last month, Rocket Lab announced a partnership with the European Space Agency to launch satellites for constellation navigation before December.
Rocket Lab also announced the successful launch of its 66th, 67th and 68th Electron rockets in June. The company successfully deployed two rockets from the same site in 48 hours.
Rocket Lab competes with a growing list of companies in a maturing and increasingly competitive space industry with growing demand. Some of the main competitors in the sector include Elon Musk‘s SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, which filed its prospectus to go public on Friday.
“For Electron, our little rocket, we’ve seen increased demand over the last couple of years and we’re not just launching single spacecraft — these are generally entire constellations for customers,” CEO Peter Beck told CNBC last month.
He said the company is producing a rocket every 15 days.
Beck, a New Zealand-native, founded the company in 2006. Since its debut on the Nasdaq in August 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, the Long Beach, California-based company’s market value has swelled to more than $19 billion.
WATCH: Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck: One thing I don’t worry about at night is demand
Technology
Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI granted up to $200 million for AI work from Defense Department
A view of the Pentagon on December 13, 2024, in Washington, DC. Home to the US Defense Department, the Pentagon is one of the world’s largest office buildings.
Daniel Slim | Afp | Getty Images
The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday said it’s granting contract awards of up to $200 million for artificial intelligence development at Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI.
The DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said the awards will help the agency accelerate its adoption of “advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.” The companies will work to develop AI agents across several mission areas at the agency.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, the DoD’s chief digital and AI officer, said in a release.
Elon Musk’s xAI also announced Grok for Government on Monday, which is a suite of products that make the company’s models available to U.S. government customers. The products are available through the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule, which allows federal government departments, agencies, or offices to purchase them, according to a post on X.
OpenAI was previously awarded a year-long $200 million contract from the DoD in 2024, shortly after it said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
In June, the company launched OpenAI for Government for U.S. federal, state, and local government workers.
WATCH: US needs an allied strategy for AI investment in military and defense: Palantir
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said he plans to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into artificial intelligence compute infrastructure, and that Meta plans to bring its first supercluster online next year.
A supercluster is a large, complex computing network that’s designed to train advanced AI models and handle their workloads.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “I’m looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!”
Zuckerberg said Meta’s first supercluster is called Prometheus, and that the company is building several other multi-gigawatt clusters. One cluster, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to five gigawatts over several years, he said.
Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. He announced a new organization in June called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers.
Zuckerberg had grown frustrated with Meta’s progress in AI, especially after the release of its Llama 4 AI models in April received a lukewarm response from developers. He is revamping Meta’s approach to better compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google.
“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg wrote Monday.
WATCH: Meta announces several multi-gigawatt data centers, first planning to come online in 2026
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