Just weeks after we reported on the eye-watering introductory sums being offered by Meta, the talent war has exploded into open conflict. With Chinese labs dominating the open-weight model landscape, Meta has launched an acquisition and recruiting offensive aimed at forcefully regaining lost ground.
Meta is reportedly offering select OpenAI researchers packages worth up to $300 million over four years, with immediate stock vesting. To put this in perspective, that’s nearly four times what Microsoft’s CEO earned last year. These aren’t signing bonuses; they’re full compensation packages designed to strip OpenAI of its top talent.
Meta’s recent haul includes seven OpenAI researchers with expertise spanning computer vision and multimodal AI. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, all from OpenAI’s Zurich office, bring deep experience in vision transformers and large-scale image-text models. Beyer and Kolesnikov were previously at Google Research where they contributed to breakthrough work on Vision Transformers (ViTs), while Zhai has published extensively on scaling laws for visual models. The four additional hires – Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi and Hongyu Ren – represent a further cross-section of OpenAI’s research talent.
Meta’s aggression extends beyond individual hires. After failing to acquire Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the company successfully recruited its CEO, Daniel Gross. Ilya Sutskever, SSI’s co-founder and former OpenAI chief scientist, confirmed Gross’s departure with a terse statement: “Daniel Gross’s time with us has been winding down, and as of June 29 he is officially no longer a part of SSI.”
The spat between Meta and OpenAI has turned personal. OpenAI’s Mark Chen described Meta’s recruiting as feeling like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.” Sam Altman responded with barely concealed contempt, declaring “missionaries will beat mercenaries” and dismissing Meta’s efforts as creating “deep cultural problems.” Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has promised recruits unlimited GPU access and resources.
MSL, co-led by Scale’s Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, represents Meta’s attempt to leapfrog the competition. The focus in this high-level race has shifted in recent months from artificial general intelligence (AGI) to superintelligence. Meta’s new division is called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), not AGI Labs. The industry now sees superintelligence as the more immediate, achievable goal. Perhaps building AI that exceeds human intelligence in specific domains appears more tractable than creating truly general intelligence. Sutskever signed off his note to investors: “We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence.” Not if Zuckerberg can get there first.
Takeaways: The AI talent war has entered a new phase where money is essentially no object. Meta’s willingness to pay CEO-level compensation to individual researchers shows how critical human talent has become to AI progress. The shift from AGI to superintelligence terminology suggests a more focused, perhaps more achievable target. This concentration of talent and resources in a handful of companies will likely accelerate progress but raises questions about the healthy development of AI.