OpenAI has promised to update its retention and pay strategies after Meta steal top talent, which recently offered hundreds of millions to hire a number of prominent experts from its rival.
The leadership group, including CEO Sam Altman, has taken the departures personally, according to a memo that Chief Research Officer Mark Chen shared on Slack.
Chen wrote:
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something. Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”
Chen promised staff that maintaining employees would not compromise internal equity and underlined continuous, round-the-clock efforts to negotiate with researchers who received outside offers.
The Wall Street Journal claims that Meta has ramped up its efforts to steal the top talent at OpenAI. According to Altman, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has allegedly contacted people directly with attractive deals, including signing incentives of up to $100 million. However, Meta officials have denied those claims.
Chen wrote on Slack:
“Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages,”
One source told WIRED:
“They haven’t necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky is the limit.”
Eight key OpenAI researchers have taken jobs at Meta in only the last two weeks, including:
- Beyer, Lucas
- Kolesnikov, Alexander
- Zhai Xiaohua
- Zhao Shengjia
- Yu Jiahui
- Bi Shuchao
- Ren Hongyu
- Bansal Trapit
Others had significant roles in OpenAI’s Zurich office, while Zhao and Bi were big contributors to GPT-4.
