Sam Altman Says Meta Offered $100M To Recruit OpenAI Talent

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta has offered his employees up to $100 million in an effort to recruit them, during a podcast released on Tuesday. He shared these details in a conversation with his brother on the show Uncapped with Jack Altman.

According to OpenAI’s CEO, Meta has been unsuccessfully trying to seduce their talent with generous offers and benefits.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” said Altman. “They started making these giant offers to a lot of people in our team—like $100 million signing bonuses.”

New episode of Uncapped with @sama. Enjoy 🤗 pic.twitter.com/2IxYt3B4Gm

— Jack Altman (@jaltma) June 17, 2025

Altman said he understands Meta’s aggressive approach, as the company is trying to stay ahead in the AI race. However, he suggested their efforts haven’t been as successful as anticipated.

“I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” added Altman. “I think that people sort of looked at the two paths and said, ‘Alright, OpenAI’s got a much better shot at actually delivering on superintelligence, and may also eventually be the more valuable company.’”

Altman also criticized Meta’s company culture, saying it focuses too much on competitors rather than on research and mission. Later in the show, he added that while he admires Meta in many ways, they are “not great at innovation.” He emphasized that OpenAI aims to be the best place in the world to develop advanced AI technologies.

According to TechCrunch,  Altman’s comments confirmed longstanding Silicon Valley rumors that Meta has been trying to recruit top talent from both OpenAI and Google, including OpenAI researcher Noam Brown—and Google’s AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu.

Meta has been trying to get the most talented AI experts for its new Superintelligence Lab, for which they have already acquired Scale AI and its CEO Alexandr Wang.

Later in the podcast, Altman also expressed curiosity about the development of AI-powered social media.