OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has alleged that Meta offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million to attract senior AI engineers from rival firms, including his own. The claim comes amid a wave of high-profile departures from OpenAI and other AI companies, many of whom have now joined Meta’s newly launched Superintelligence Labs.
The Meta division formally titled Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) was announced on Monday and is focused on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The unit brings together Meta’s foundational AI model teams, product groups, and its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) wing, with an emphasis on building next-generation large language models (LLMs).
Reports by Bloomberg and Wired indicate that Meta has hired at least 11 senior AI researchers from competitors including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Among the new hires are:
Trapit Bansal, co-creator of OpenAI’s o-series
Shuchao Bi, who worked on GPT-4o voice and multimodal post-training
Ji Lin, contributor to GPT-4 reasoning systems
Huiwen Chang, formerly at Google Research
Joel Pobar, returning to Meta from Anthropic
Jack Rae, Johan Schalkwyk, Pei Sun from Google
Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, Shengjia Zhao from OpenAI
Meta has denied the $100 million figure cited by Altman. The company’s Chief Technology Officer called the claim “inaccurate.”
At the helm of Meta Superintelligence Labs is Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who has been appointed Chief AI Officer. He will lead the division alongside Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, who will oversee AI product development and applied research. The creation of the Chief AI Officer role is part of a broader internal reorganisation to centralise AGI efforts.
In an internal note, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said superintelligence is “coming into sight,” and described the move as part of Meta’s long-term commitment to advancing AI research and deployment.
Meta has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring part of its team, and is reportedly in talks with several AI startups, including Perplexity AI, Runway, and PlayAI, a company focused on AI voice replication technologies.
Meta’s announcement comes amid increasing competition in the AGI space. Earlier this year, Microsoft hired most of Inflection AI’s staff in a $650 million deal, while Amazon has brought in talent from Adept. OpenAI is also undergoing internal restructuring, following several high-profile exits in recent months.
The formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs is seen as part of an ongoing industry-wide push by major tech firms to accelerate progress in building general-purpose artificial intelligence systems.
