Meta Platforms (META) Tries to Poach OpenAI Staff with ‘$100M Bonuses’

Meta Platforms (META) is attempting to poach artificial intelligence (AI) experts from OpenAI to build its new superintelligence team. Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT maker, said in a podcast yesterday that Meta has “started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team.” Facebook’s parent company is offering $100 million in signing bonuses and hefty compensation packages to lure OpenAI’s top talent. However, these efforts have been futile, as Altman confirmed that “at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is personally leading the effort in building its superintelligence lab by recruiting top AI talent to gain an edge in the AI race. Last week, Meta brought in former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the team, while also announcing a massive $14.3 billion investment in the AI data-labeling startup.

Meta Considers OpenAI its ‘Biggest Competitor’

Interestingly, Altman mentioned that he believes OpenAI’s employees are sticking with the company because they see it reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) faster than its peers. OpenAI’s valuation as a private company is also growing rapidly, with the firm being valued at $300 billion in its latest funding round. Altman also said, “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor.”

Altman also stated that, in his view, Meta lacks innovation and will struggle to catch up to the competition if it fails to “truly innovate.” To foster innovation, Meta will need to bolster its AI team with visionary minds. Meta has already poached some bright minds from its rivals, including DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Sesame AI’s Johan Schalkwyk. However, its efforts to poach OpenAI’s lead researcher Noam Brown and Google’s AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu failed miserably.

Tech Giants Locked in a Fierce AI Race

Tech giants are spending billions of dollars on strengthening and advancing their AI software and infrastructure initiatives. Meta, however, has somehow been left behind as several of its experts have left the company for better opportunities. At the same time, rivals, including AI startups and the AI labs of big tech companies such as Alphabet’s (GOOGL) DeepMind and China’s DeepSeek, have already taken the lead by innovating advanced AI models.

These competitors have all launched successful advanced open-source AI models. Notably, Meta is also on track to roll out its open-source AI model later this summer. Altman is confident that OpenAI’s “research team did something unexpected and quite amazing and we think it will be very very worth the wait.”

Is Meta Stock Worth Buying?

Despite the short-term hiccups, Wall Street remains highly optimistic about Meta Platforms’ long-term stock trajectory. Yesterday, the social media giant announced that it will roll out ads on WhatsApp soon, with analysts predicting WhatsApp ads generating more than $10 billion in annual revenue run-rate by 2028.

On TipRanks, META stock has a Strong Buy consensus rating based on 42 Buys, three Holds, and one Sell rating. The average Meta Platforms price target of $699.81 implies that shares are almost fully valued at current levels. Year-to-date, META stock has gained 19.2%.

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