Meta CTO in Town Hall: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is lying, 'we did not ...'

The competition for top

artificial intelligence

(AI) talent is heating up, and the tech giants are publicly clashing over recruitment tactics. Just days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta, Facebook's parent company, was offering as much as $100 million to poach its AI talent,

Meta CTO

Andrew Bosworth directly refuted these assertions during a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday (June 26).Asserting it’s winning the recruitment war against OpenAI, Bosworth said, “Sam is just being dishonest here”, highlighting that

Meta

did not offer “phenomenal deals” and “ridiculous offers,” including "tens of millions of dollars" and even "$100 million signing bonuses," to poach his employees.“He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for every single person… Look, you guys, the market’s hot. It’s not that hot,” Bosworth stated when asked by an employee about Altman's remarks.

Altman is countering all Meta’s offers: Bosworth

Altman’s “hundred-million-dollar bonus” figure, initially mentioned on his brother's podcast, quickly became a widespread meme on social media. Bosworth clarified Meta's position, explaining that any exceptionally high offers are not typical for the broader

AI market

.

“What Sam neglects to mention is that he’s countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles” within Meta's new superintelligence AI team, Bosworth told employees.“That is not the general thing that’s happening in the AI space. And of course, he’s not mentioning what the actual terms of the offer are. It’s not [a] sign-on bonus. It’s all these different things,” he added.Bosworth went on to highlight recent reports of several OpenAI researchers joining Meta, adding that “quite a few more are in the pipeline that I can’t announce or share right now.”He concluded with a direct challenge to Altman's statements: "Sam is known to exaggerate, and in this case, I know exactly why he’s doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI. He’s not very happy about that."