Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently been in something like employment, trying to keep Meta’s new Superintelligence team to competing lab AI researchers and staff. To work on Zuckerberg’s physically nearby desks with former scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Meta reportedly offers more than $100 million employees to employees in Openai and Google Deepmind compensation packages.
Openai CEO Sam Altman confirmed these reports on a podcast with his brother Jack Altman, released Tuesday. However, Openai’s CEO said Zuckerberg’s recruitment efforts have largely failed, and in the process they have forced Meta to be excavated several more times.
“(Meta) has begun to offer huge offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman told the podcast. “You know, $100 million signature bonus, more than that (…) compensation (…) I’m really pleased that our best people have decided to lead him to it, at least so far.”
Openai’s CEO said he believes his employees have evaluated Openai that it is likely to achieve AGI and that one day it could become a more valuable company. He also said he believes that Meta is focused on high employee compensation packages rather than on missions to provide AGIs.
Meta reportedly attempted to poach one of Open’s lead researchers, Norm Brown, and Google’s AI architect Koray Kavukuglu. But both efforts failed.
Sam Altman went on to say that Openai’s culture of innovation is the key to its success and believes Meta’s “current AI efforts aren’t going as well as they hoped.” Openai’s CEO said he respects a lot about the meta, but “I don’t think it’s a company that’s good at innovation.” Later on the podcast, Altman said he thinks it’s not enough for companies to keep up with AI.
Openai’s comments highlight some of the challenges META must overcome to build a successful AI Superintelligence Lab. Last week, Meta announced that in addition to introducing Wang, it has also invested heavily in Wang’s former company, Scale AI. The company also reportedly caught several star AI researchers, including Jack Rae of Google Deepmind and Johan Schalkwyk of Sesame Ai. But there’s more work to be done ahead.
Next year, Meta will need to staff the new AI team, but Openai, Anthropic and Google Deepmind will run at full speed. Over the next few months, Openai plans to release an open AI model that is likely to re-set more meta in AI races.
Later on a podcast, Sam Altman described an AI-powered social media feed that is likely to break into Meta’s apps. Openai said he’s interested in using AI to explore social media apps that provide custom feeds based on what users want, rather than the default algorithm feeds that exist in traditional social media apps.
Openai is reportedly working on social networking apps internally. Meanwhile, META is experimenting with AI-powered social networks via the Meta AI app. However, some users seem to be confused by the Meta AI app and share hyper-personal chats with the wider world.
It’s still possible to see if AI-powered social networks will take off. In the meantime, Zuckerberg and Sam Altman appear to be poised to stab their heads into AI talent races.