I feel like there's a lot of half-truths in the article and some of the comments here.
1. The $100M is a huge number. Maybe there was 1 person, working on large-scale training or finetuning, who had an offer like this, which surely was a high offer even in base (like let's say $1M+), and had a lot of stock and bonus clauses, which over 4+ years could have worked out to a big number. But I don't believe that the average SWE or DE ("staffer") working on the OpenAI ChatGPT UI Javascript would get this offer..
2. One of the comments here says "[Zuck] has mediocre talent". I worked at Facebook ~10 years ago, it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure it's still an impressive set of people overall.
Disclaimer: I don't work in the LLM space, not even in the US tech space anymore.
Whether this is true or not, this is a clever move to publicize. Anyone being poached by Meta now from OpenAI will feel like asking for 100m bonuses and will possibly feel underappreciated with only a 20 or 50 million signing bonus.
I think money and the promise of resources will convince enough qualified people to join Meta, but I guess it doesn't help their recruiting efforts that Zuck seems to have the most dystopian and anti-human AGI vision of all the company heads.
Of course we have good reasons to be cynical about Sam Altman or Anthropic's Dario Amodei, but at least their public statements and blog posts pretend to envision a positive future where humanity is empowered. They might bring about ruinous disruption that humanity won't recover from while trying to do that, but at least they claim to care.
What is Zuckerberg's vision? AI generated friends for which there is a "demand" (because their social networks pivoted away from connecting humans) and genAI advertising to more easily hack people's reward centers.
He said "none of our best people have left" which means some are leaving.
And OpenAi probably had to renegotiate with those with a $100m offer so their costs went up.
Suppose it is karma for Zuckerberg, Meta have abused privacy so much many dislike them and won't work for them out of principle.
This is software developing a transfer market like footballers, isn't it? We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.
In both cases this is driven by "tournament wages": you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers, because the size of your team is limited and the important metric is beating the other team.
It's also interesting to contrast this with the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric. It sounds like the compensation curve is going to get steeper and steeper.
I think the real breakthroughs will come from some randos or some researchers, not sure if throwing huge amounts of money to something is always the solution, otherwise many diseases would have been dealt with already.
Raising the bar for salaries to be so high creates a huge moat for all these massive companies. Meta and OpenAI can afford to pay $100M for 10-20 top employees, but that would consume the entire initial funding round for startups such as Superintelligence from Ilya Sustskever, who raised $2 billion.
"Up to"
Still, though, as far as I know that kind of hiring bonus is unheard of. Surely Deepseek and Google have shown that the skills of OpenAI employees are not unique, so this must be part of an effort to cripple OpenAI by poaching their best employees.
Man did I get some pushback when I said this a week ago. People just really don't want to believe the sums involved here.
I thought that the report that was being screenshotted a few weeks ago on the relative movements of staff between the top AI labs[0] would make for a good companion data point. Except now that I look at it, Meta didn't even make it to the graph :-/
[0] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...
If I were one of the targeted, I'd probably take it as a learning opportunity. Doesn't Yann LeCun work there as the VP and Chief AI Scientist? I don't know many others doing much research other than monetizing LLMs. DeepMind by far would be my (uninformed) first choice.
As for ethics, Meta/FB is disliked but they seem pretty transparent compared to OpenAI [sic].
The job market in software seems crazy to me at the moment. It's becoming all or nothing.
$100m for a staff member sounds crazy, but on the other hand if they were hired before ChatGPT was released and they got stock options still vesting, you might need to compensate them a 100m just for losing their stock.
Is there any reason to think he’s not just lying? His entire track record is riddled with dishonesty, about OpenAI’s mission, about the capabilities of their next AI model, about his own role and financial incentives.
I see no reason to believe anything Altman says, but food for thought:
Is it possible such a bonus, if it exists, would be contingent on Meta inventing AGI within a certain number of years, for some definition of AGI? Or possibly would have some other very ambitious performance metric for advancing the technology?
Simple hack for Sam. Hire a bunch of people for some nominal amount. They do not have to do anything and they know nothing about AI. Then let Zuck waste his wad paying out signing bonuses to fake employees.
Sam Altman is a sociopath who seems to desire only power. He plays teams against each other at the same company. He backstabs people. He lies. He betrays people. He knows how to push levers and exploit relationships and normal human behavior.
I'm disappointed how many people here are accepting it so non-critically. It could be true, but for me, it's very difficult to believe. Are OpenAI staffers really telling Sam Altman what their offers are?
From Bayes' theorem it is much simpler to assume, Sam is lying to burnish the reputation of his company, as he does every week. From a manipulation point of view, it's perfect. Meta won't contradict it, and nobody from OpenAI can contradict it. It hinders Meta's ability to negotiate because engineers will expect more. It makes OpenAI look great -- wow, everyone loves the company so much that they can't be bought off -- and of course he sneaks in a little revenge jab at the end, he just had to say that, of course, "all the good people stayed". He is disgustingly good at these double meanings, statements that appear innocuous but are actually not.
Altman really is a generational bullshit artist. Exaggerating the value of his talent while pretending he hasn't already lost a lot of his most valuable people (he has).
It makes sense he focuses on Meta in this interview -- his other competitors actually have taken some of his top talent and are producing better models than GPT now.
So is 10s of million a common sign on bonus for individual contributors in the AI space?
Whatever Altman says can't be trusted.
Any provable confirmation here around?
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https://archive.ph/PrRvH