Meta hires 3 OpenAI employees days after Sam Altman claimed Zuckerberg offered $100 million to lure his staff

Meta

Meta is way behind OpenAI and Google in the AI race and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t happy about it. To fix that, he’s now taking some bold and some might say desperate steps to supercharge Meta’s AI efforts. His latest move? Hiring top employees straight from OpenAI.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Meta has hired three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich office — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. OpenAI confirmed their exit but didn’t share more details.

This comes just days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly called out Meta, claiming that Zuckerberg’s company had been offering $100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an attempt to lure them away.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said last week and honestly, moves like this prove he’s probably right.

Meta is currently trying to assemble a so-called “superintelligence team” a group of top AI minds focused on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which basically means AI that’s as smart as humans (or smarter) across a wide range of tasks.

This isn’t the only big AI move from Meta. Just recently, the company hired 28-year-old Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and even invested $14.3 billion to pick up a 49% stake in his company.

Meta, once seen as a leader in open-source AI, has faced delays, staff exits, and postponed launches in recent years. But with Zuckerberg now aggressively hunting for top talent, the AI race is heating up like never before.