The epic battle for AI talent—with exploding offers, secret deals and tears

WALL STREET JOURNAL

For his new AI division focused on superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, Zuckerberg has poached from Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Apple, and pulled at least a dozen employees from OpenAI.

But many have turned him down. He’s offered more than 10 of OpenAI’s researchers eye-watering pay packages of $300 million over four years, including $100 million the first year, according to people familiar with the matter. And after months of recruiting, Meta still doesn’t have a chief scientist for its lab.

“I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get,” Altman told his staff in a Slack message.

Still, the pressure has rattled OpenAI. Chen, whose conversation with Zuckerberg had helped spur Meta’s recruiting push, reassured OpenAI employees in late June that the company’s leadership was responding to the aggressive recruitment by adjusting compensation packages and “scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward our top talent,” he wrote in a Slack message seen by the Journal.

Chen shared another OpenAI research leader’s message to employees: “if they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, its not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision.”

OpenAI employees reacted to Chen’s note with heart emojis—and emojis of Chen’s face.

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