{"id":224920,"date":"2025-06-29T21:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T21:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/224920\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T21:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T21:04:09","slug":"openai-leadership-responds-to-meta-offers-someone-has-broken-into-our-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/224920\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Leadership Responds to Meta Offers: ‘Someone Has Broken Into Our Home’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by WIRED, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers<\/a> from the company to join Meta\u2019s superintelligence lab.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,\u201d Chen wrote. \u201cPlease trust that we haven\u2019t been sitting idly by.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders at the company \u201caround the clock to talk to those with offers,\u201d adding, \u201cwe\u2019ve been more proactive than ever before, we\u2019re recalibrating comp, and we\u2019re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has \u201chigh personal standards of fairness,\u201d and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. \u201cWhile I\u2019ll fight to keep every one of you, I won\u2019t do so at the price of fairness to others,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

The news comes as competition for top AI researchers is heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers, according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother<\/a>, Jack Altman. Multiple sources at OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number. The Meta CEO has also been personally reaching out to potential recruits, according to the Wall Street Journal.<\/a> \u201cOver the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages,\u201d Chen wrote on Slack.<\/p>\n

A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting, with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI and Google. Anthropic<\/a>, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta, one source tells WIRED. \u201cThey haven\u2019t necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky is the limit,\u201d the source says.<\/p>\n

Both OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company, where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer from Meta: \u201cIf they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it\u2019s not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision. WIRED is not naming the leader as they are not a C-suite executive. \u201cI\u2019d like to be able to talk to you through it and I know all about their offers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1942,51,597,598,1318,20208,4806,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-224920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","11":"tag-meta","12":"tag-openai","13":"tag-sam-altman","14":"tag-silicon-valley","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114768685629533905","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}