Sam Altman In Hot Soup Over Rs 850 Cr Hiring Bonus Claim, Meta CTO Dubs Him "Dishonest"

The hiring war in the AI domain between tech giants Meta and OpenAI has intensified after Sam Altman claim that Mark Zuckerberg's firm was paying close to Rs 10 crore signing bonuses to leave his San-Fransico headquartered AI venture.

Meanwhile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth dispelled the reportedly false claim and called out Altman as "someone who’s “known to exaggerate” things and is "dishonest”.

Recently, three top OpenAI researchers - Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai, and Lucas Beyer have individually denied getting any USD 100 million bonus for joining Meta calling it fake news.

In a post on X, Beyer wrote, “Hey all, couple quick notes: 1) Yes, we will be joining Meta. 2) No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news.”

Further, he said that he’s excited about what lies ahead and promised to share more details in the future.

This comes after Altman went on record claiming that Meta was trying to poach talent from his AI startup but reportedly none of his best people have decided to take him up on that.

However, what Altman could probably be hinting at is that Meta might be offering a hefty package to nab top OpenAI talent, even to the tune of USD 100 million perhaps, but it is reserved for “a very, very small number of people,” for “senior, senior leadership roles,” and “it’s not [a] sign-on bonus” as widely reported. 

Also Read: How to Earn Rs 50,000 Per Month After You Quit Your Job

Bosworth claimed the reason behind Altman's “exaggerated” remarks was his unhappiness that “we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI.”

One of these big hires, Lucas Beyer, took to X (formerly Twitter), to confirm he along with fellow colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – all ex-AI researchers at OpenAI – were joining Meta and were excited about what’s ahead while simultaneously denying getting “100M sign-on” bonuses, calling it fake news.

During the same internal meeting, Bosworth said, that “quite a few more” OpenAI researchers are going to soon join Meta though he “can’t announce or share [more details] right now.”

Why has The AI Talent War Intensified?

Well, this was further fueled due to Meta's latest hiring spree. This comes as the Zuckerberg led firm aims at building a new superintelligence team to bolster its AI efforts against competition intensification from OpenAI and Google, particularly in areas like reasoning and reinforcement engineering, where it is largely lagging.