AI Daily: Altman says Meta tried, failed to poach OpenAI talent

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly: 

POACH FAIL: On a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, on the future of AI, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said Meta made “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” like $100M signing bonuses, and “none of our best people” have accepted. The OpenAI CEO said he believed his employees made the assessment that OpenAI had a better chance of achieving Artificial General Intelligence and may one day be the more valuable company. He also said he believes Meta’s focus on high compensation packages for employees, rather than the mission of delivering AGI, would likely not create a great culture.

NEW FINANCIAL CONCESSIONS: OpenAI wants Microsoft (MSFT) to take a roughly 33% stake in exchange for foregoing future profit rights, and is seeking to modify its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft, The Information’s Sri Muppidi and Aaron Holmes report. 

WORK WITH SCALE AI: OpenAI is winding down its work with Scale AI, the artificial intelligence startup that received a multibillion-dollar investment from Meta (META) earlier this month and saw its founder join the social media company to lead an AI effort, CNBC’s Ashley Capoot reports. Scale is best known for its work helping major tech companies, including OpenAI, prepare data they use to train cutting-edge AI models. But OpenAI has been pulling back from the startup over the last six to 12 months, according to an OpenAI spokesperson. OpenAI has been looking to work with other data providers that have kept pace with innovation and understand what the latest models need, the spokesperson said. OpenAI’s decision to wrap up its work with Scale AI wasn’t influenced by the Meta partnership, the spokesperson said.

NEW AI CLOUD SOFTWARE PRODUCTS: CoreWeave (CRWV) announced at the Weights & Biases Fully Connected Conference the launch of three new AI cloud software products and capabilities to “help customers develop, deploy, and iterate AI faster.” The company stated, “Today’s rollout is the first software integration leveraging CoreWeave’s cloud services to power Weights & Biases, the AI developer platform, following CoreWeave’s acquisition of Weights & Biases in May 2025. The new products and capabilities provide leading AI labs, AI engineers, and AI developers a robust AI platform to train models, perform inference at scale and efficiently, and monitor production AI applications.” Mission Control Integration, W&B Inference and W&B Weave Online Evaluations are currently available to customers in preview, CoreWeave stated.