Meta has poached at least 10 artificial intelligence researchers from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, while reportedly offering some other top talent packages worth more than $150 million ($US100 million) in the first year alone for joining its new superintelligence team.

The aggressive hiring spree, which has reportedly been criticised by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, comes as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg hopes his firm can make AI as smart as humans (artificial general intelligence, or AGI) or smarter than humans (superintelligence) before anyone else.

Meta has offered some top-tier AI researchers and executives packages of up to $450 million ($US300 million) over four years, according to sources which spoke to Wired — but none of those top earners were supposedly from OpenAI.

Meta has also recruited from other AI competitors such as Google, Anthropic, Sesame, Microsoft’s GitHub, and Scale AI.

While the reported $US300 million packages were not all-cash offers and supposedly included some equity in Meta, the social media giant has also allegedly made at least 10 "staggeringly high offers” offers to recruit OpenAI staffers.

OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, allegedly told his colleagues it felt like someone had “broken into our home and stolen something”.

Zuckerberg reportedly told potential recruits they would not need to worry about running out of resources, according to The Wall Street Journal, following reports some OpenAI workers wanted access to more computing power than the research lab currently had.

The alleged enormity of the recruitment packages has been disputed by Meta, with a spokesperson reportedly telling Wired “the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place".

However, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth reportedly told staff $150 million ($US100 million) sign-on offers consisted of “different things”, were not given to everyone, and were being somewhat countered by OpenAI.

“Look, you guys, the market's hot — it's not that hot,” he reportedly said.

Altman hits back, calls Meta ‘somewhat distasteful’

In a note to OpenAI staff on Monday, Altman reportedly said while Meta had “gotten a few great people” from his ranks, what Zuckerberg's company was doing would “lead to very deep cultural problems”.

“It is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list,” he allegedly told staff in a note obtained by Wired.

“They have been trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I've lost track of how many people from here they've tried to get to be their chief scientist."


Meta recently recruited AI experts who worked on OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude AI models. Image: Shutterstock

Altman reportedly hinted OpenAI was reevaluating workers’ compensation and argued the company differed from Meta because its workers “actually care about building AGI in a good way”.

“Missionaries will beat mercenaries,” he reportedly said.

“… I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock.

“But I think it's important that huge upside comes after huge success; what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems.

“We will have more to share about this soon but it's very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target.”

Altman allegedly said Meta was “acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful” and argued OpenAI had a better workplace culture.

“Other companies care more about [AGI] as an instrumental goal to some other mission,” he reportedly said.

“But this is our top thing, and always will be.

“Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here, day after day, year after year, figuring out how to do what we do better than anyone else.”

The birth of Meta Superintelligence Labs

Altman’s note to OpenAI staff came on the same day Zuckerberg announced who would join Meta’s new superintelligence team, co-led by 28-year-old Alexandr Wang.

Wang, who will be Meta’s chief AI officer, was brought over to the company after Meta took a 49 per cent stake in his own AI annotation firm Scale AI for around $21.8 billion ($US14.3 billion).

Alongside Wang, the new Meta Superintelligence Labs division will also be led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who is expected to steer Meta’s AI products and applied research work.

The group will include Meta’s existing AI teams, such as its Fundamental AI Research lab, but also “a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models”, Zuckerberg wrote in a note to staff, as reported by Bloomberg.

“We’re going to start research on our next generation models to get to the frontier in the next year or so,” he allegedly said.

Meta's latest hires included several former OpenAI researchers, including Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, Xiaohua Zhai, Trapit Bansal, Huiwen Chang, Ji Lin, and Shuchao Bi.

Others included former Anthropic researchers Joel Pobar and Shengjia Zhao, Google researchers Pei Sun and Jack Rae, and Sesame’s Johan Schalkwyk.

Meta and OpenAI's high-cost tussle over AI talent has highlighted the increased market demand for experts in AI and machine learning, which has led to higher salaries.

Even former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines Lab has reportedly offered $760,000 ($US500,000) salaries to potential recruits.

In Australia, demand for AI specialists has increased according to a recent report, while more local companies have also begun to include AI-related tasks in job interviews.