Meta $ 100 million signing bonuses for Openai staff are only the last sign of the Talent War of Extreme AI
The AI talent war held between large technological companies while they compete for an increasingly small group of IA elite researchers. According to the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, Meta aggressively continued the best engineers in the company – offering attractive compensation and several million dollars signature bonuses.
Altman said on an episode of Non -ceiling that Meta had made “giant offers to many people in our team”, some totaling “$ 100 million in signature and more than that [in] compensation per year. »»
This is the latest example of intense competition for the best talents and companies are ready to go recruit and keep them.
Meta is particularly attached to her AI recruitment reader for the moment. The company has lost several of its best IA researchers in recent years and is currently fighting a story which he has lagged behind in the AI race after its new Llama 3 model received a lukewarm reaction from developers.
This gave Zuckerberg a kick in Overdrive and would have led the CEO to recruit personally for a new team of AI “superintendent” of 50 people in Meta. Meta also recently invested up to $ 15 billion for a 49% stake in the training company, Scaleai, as part of a plan to hire the CEO of Alexandr Wang.
While Altman said that none of his best people had decided to submit the generous offer of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta managed to attract other eminent AI researchers.
According to Bloomberg, Meta also hired Jack Rae, Google Deepmind’s principal researcher, for the team and called on Johan Schalkwyk, a leader in automatic learning of the AI IA startup. Meta would have failed in her efforts to poach the best OpenAi researcher, Noam Brown, and the architect AI of Google, Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Meta is also AI laboratory colleagues with a retention rate of 64%, according to signalfire recently released 2025 report on the state of talents. In Buzzy AI Startup Anthropic, 80% of employees hired at least two years ago are still in the company, an impressive figure in an industry known for its high turnover.
Meta representatives did not immediately respond to a recent request for a comment from Fortune, Done outside the normal working hours of the company.
AI talented gap
Zuckerberg’s wage offers reach the pro-athlete threshold, which, as Fortune Sharon Goldman Note, becomes normal for the course of the industry.
Deedy Das, a VC in Menlo Ventures, previously said Fortune That he heard several people that the meta-PDG tried to recruit. “Zuck had telephone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join a 2 million dollars / year floor.”
Although Meta can make the headlines, it is not the only company to make extreme lengths to preserve and recruit this talent. Google Deepmind could apply non -compatible clauses of six to 12 months which prevent some IA researchers from joining competitors, which paid them full wages even if they are sidelined.
In Openai, the company should offer a remuneration from the sky to keep talents, the best researchers earning more than $ 10 million per year. According to Reuters, the company offered more than $ 2 million in retention premiums and stocks exceeding $ 20 million to dissuade the defections of the new company from Ilya Sutskever, SSI.
While the Elite AI laboratories work overtime to lock the best talents, the complete image of AI engineers, especially junior talents, is not as pink. Several recent reports, including signalfire 2025 report on the state of talents, have suggested that entry -level hiring in the technology industry is collapsing.
According to the report, hiring for the roles of intermediate and senior level rebounded after the 2023 crisis, but the cuts for new graduates have just continued to come. Among large technological companies, new graduates represent only 7% of hires, down 25% compared to 2023 and more than 50% of pre-pale levels in 2019. For startups, new graduates represent less than 6% of new hires, down 11% compared to 2023 and more than 30% of pre-pale levels in 2019.
