Meta CTO Bosworth says OpenAI countered lucrative job offers to AI startup's employees

• OpenAI is countering Meta's high-priced offers in the AI talent war, Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth said on Friday.
• Meta is picking up talent inside and outside the social media company to work on building AI that's superior to human capability.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altmansaid on a podcast this week that Meta has dangled $100 million signing bonuses in front of the startup's employees, but that his company's best people have opted to stay.

According to Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI countered Meta's offers.

“The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive,” Bosworth, who joined Meta in 2006 and has been CTO since 2022, told CNBC's “Closing Bell Overtime” on Friday.

The AI hiring war heated up dramatically last week, when Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, said he will join Meta to work on superintelligence, a term for technology that exceeds human capability. Meta will invest over $14 billion in Scale AI in exchange for a 49% stake, in a deal that was targeted at luring Wang and a few of his top staffers.

On Thursday, CNBC reported that Meta had sought to buy former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new startup Safe Superintelligence but is now hiring its CEO, Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The two have a position in Safe Superintelligence through their venture firm NFDG.

And earlier on Friday, CNBC confirmed that Meta reached out to startup Perplexity AI about a possible acquisition, but the deal never materialized.

“We really believe in a future where a superintelligent AI is going to be helping humans at every step of the way,” Bosworth said. “Wherever they could use an extra helping hand, it's there for them. And so we've been lucky to have this kind of team rally around, both external now and increasingly internal, with people like Alex Wang, this idea of superintelligence and doing what it takes to pursue that vision.”

In the first quarter, Meta's capital expenditures and principal payments on finance leases approached $14 billion.

“Now,” Bosworth said, “we're meeting that investment in personnel, and the compute and the people together are what makes it happen.”

Altman said on this week's podcast, hosted by his brother, that Meta had promised the bonuses on top of more than $100 million in annual compensation.

OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this month OpenAI said it had reached $10 billion in annualized revenue, but the company continues to rack up hefty losses.