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Meta’s $100M Bids for AI Talent Rebuffed, Says OpenAI’s Altman

Meta Platforms offered AI researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind pay packages “north of $100 million” to join a new super-intelligence unit led by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, working near CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Bloomberg reported. 

In a podcast released Tuesday, OpenAI chief Sam Altman confirmed the overtures but said “none of our best people have taken him up,” arguing that mission outweighs money. Meta’s efforts to lure OpenAI scientist Noam Brown and DeepMind architect Koray Kavukcuoglu also failed, though it has signed Jack Rae, Johan Schalkwyk and invested heavily in Scale AI to secure frontier-model expertise. The escalating talent tug-of-war underscores global efforts to achieve artificial general intelligence.

James Dargan
About the author
James Dargan

James Dargan is a writer and researcher at The AI Insider. His focus is on the AI startup ecosystem and he writes articles on the space that have a tone accessible to the average reader.

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