June 27, 2025 – Silicon Valley
The artificial intelligence arms race between tech giants has taken another dramatic turn. Recent reports suggested Meta was aggressively offering signing bonuses up to $100 million to lure top talent away from OpenAI. But Meta’s leadership team has publicly denied these claims, calling them “wildly exaggerated.”
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth took to social media and internal memos to clarify: “We’re investing significantly in our GenAI and superintelligence efforts, but these kinds of figures are reserved for rare, senior-level leadership roles—not for mass poaching.”
This pushback comes after rumors spread across forums and internal leaks that Meta had offered lavish incentives—including stock packages, personal compute clusters, and accelerated research independence—to OpenAI engineers following internal strife at the ChatGPT-maker.
Why the Buzz?
OpenAI has had a turbulent year, with leadership shakeups, criticism over safety policies, and growing concerns about its partnership with Microsoft. In contrast, Meta has leaned into an open-source approach, winning favor among developers and AI researchers who value transparency.
Meta's AI division—led by Bosworth and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun—has grown to over 2,000 researchers and engineers, with a clear mission: challenge the dominance of OpenAI and Google DeepMind by building a next-generation open foundational model.
Not Just About Money
Insiders suggest the real allure isn’t just financial. Meta offers AI researchers more freedom to publish, wider compute access, and a long-term vision for AI as entertainment, not just productivity. Their LLaMA models are widely used in the open-source community, giving engineers both prestige and visibility.
But critics argue that AI’s explosive growth has created a dangerous bidding war. “When researchers are worth $50M+ in equity, we risk creating a brain drain that makes safe, responsible AI development even harder,” said Dr. Julia Hanson, an AI ethics researcher at Stanford.
The Bigger Picture
This story isn’t just about hiring—it's a chess match for the future of intelligence. With talent as the most valuable resource, tech giants are willing to pay whatever it takes to win the AI race.
As the lines blur between science and corporate strategy, the world watches to see who will shape tomorrow’s AI superintelligence—and at what cost.