Three OpenAI engineers are joining Meta, but how true is Sam Altman’s $100 million bonus claim? | Company Business News-OxBig News Network

Three key OpenAI engineers, who founded the company’s office in Zurich last year, are indeed leaving Sam Altman’s firm and joining Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta — but there is a catch.

Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai are not getting a $100 million joining bonus per person as was reported earlier.

Beyer on Thursday junked all reports of the engineers getting $100 million, calling it a fake news but confirmed that all three of them will, in fact, join Meta.

“Hey all, couple quick notes: 1) yes, we will be joining Meta. 2) no, we did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news. Excited about what’s ahead though, will share more in due time! [sic],” he wrote in a post on X.

The claim of Beyer, Kolesnikov and Zhai getting $100 million from Meta was made by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who called the offer ‘crazy’ in a podcast with his brother.

“They started making these like, giant offers, to a lot of people on our team—$100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year,” he told his brother Jack Altman in an episode of the ‘Uncapped’ podcast.

“I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.” Sam Altman had said at the time.

However, subsequent report and Beyer’s confirmation on Thursday proved the OpenAI CEO wrong.

In his post, one person commented that Altman “clearly just threw out the 100m figure out there to make potential takers think that they were being lowballed.”

“Yes, it was a brilliant move, gotta give him that,” Beyer replied.

Mark Zuckerberg amps up AI effort

To keep up with the rapidly-transforming AI landscape, Zuckerberg’s Meta is reportedly on a hiring spree to build a 50-person “Superintelligence” team.

Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai were poached by Sam Altman’s OpenAI in 2024 from Google DeepMind.

Meta recently hired 28-year-old Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to work on its “superintelligence” efforts. The company also took a 49% stake for $14.3 billion in Scale AI.

Meta is now trying to paint a turnaround as reports suggest Zuckerberg is setting up a team of experts to achieve so-called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI).