{"id":18793,"date":"2025-06-27T10:20:26","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T10:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/18793\/"},"modified":"2025-06-27T10:20:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T10:20:26","slug":"meta-says-its-winning-the-talent-war-with-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/18793\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta says it\u2019s winning the talent war with OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday, some of Meta\u2019s top executives were asked about the \u201c$100 million signing bonuses\u201d that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/strong> claimed<\/a> they had been offering to poach his employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cSam is just being dishonest here,\u201d Andrew Bosworth<\/strong>, Meta\u2019s CTO, said at the meeting when asked about Altman\u2019s remarks. \u201cHe\u2019s suggesting that we\u2019re doing this for every single person\u2026 Look, you guys, the market\u2019s hot. It\u2019s not that hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201c$100 million bonus\u201d headline has rightfully become a meme on social media since Altman said the number on his brother\u2019s podcast. \u201cWhat Sam neglects to mention is that he\u2019s countering all these offers, creating a small market for a very, very small number of people who are for senior, senior leadership roles\u201d in the new superintelligence AI team Meta is building<\/a>, Bosworth told Meta employees today. \u201cThat is not the general thing that\u2019s happening in the AI space. And of course, he\u2019s not mentioning what the actual terms of the offer are. It\u2019s not [a] sign-on bonus. It\u2019s all these different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bosworth then referenced recent stories about a handful of OpenAI researchers who are joining Meta and said there are \u201cquite a few more in the pipeline that I can\u2019t announce or share right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSam is known to exaggerate, and in this case, I know exactly why he\u2019s doing it, which is because we are succeeding at getting talent from OpenAI,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s not very happy about that.\u201d <\/p>\n

At the Thursday meeting, there were many employees present from the company\u2019s engineering \u201cbootcamp,\u201d a multi-week onboarding program that assigns new hires to various teams. \u201cFor all the new bootcampers here, you didn\u2019t screw up,\u201d Bosworth said to laughs and claps from the audience. \u201cYou made a great decision. Comp is right where it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bosworth wasn\u2019t the only Meta exec to mention OpenAI during the internal meeting. CPO Chris Cox <\/strong>also acknowledged that, while Meta AI has one billion monthly users, engagement \u201cis not nearly as deep as the way that people are using ChatGPT.\u201d The standalone Meta AI app has only 450,000 daily users, he told employees, and \u201ca lot of those folks\u201d are using it to manage their Ray-Ban Meta glasses. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not going to go right after ChatGPT and try and do a better job with helping you write your emails at work,\u201d Cox said. \u201cWe need to differentiate here by not focusing obsessively on productivity, which is what you see Anthropic and OpenAI and Google doing. We\u2019re going to go focus on entertainment, on connection with friends, on how people live their lives, on all of the things that we uniquely do well, which is a big part of the strategy going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta declined to comment on the internal meeting. <\/p>\n

\"Jason<\/a><\/p>\n

Jason Rugolo. Getty Images \/ The Verge<\/p>\n

When I spoke with Jason Rugolo<\/strong> on Thursday, I wanted to understand why he is suing the most influential company in tech. <\/p>\n

Rugolo\u2019s AI device startup, Iyo, recently won a temporary restraining order<\/a> that bars OpenAI from using the \u201cio\u201d brand for Sam Altman\u2019s <\/strong>new hardware division with Jony Ive<\/strong>. In response, Altman took to his X account<\/a> to suggest that Rugolo filed his trademark lawsuit because OpenAI refused to invest in or buy Iyo, which is gearing up to release its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this year. <\/p>\n

Rugolo acknowledges (and documents submitted to the court confirm) that he pitched Altman on investing multiple times. He also discussed an acquisition with io team members this year. Still, he says his lawsuit isn\u2019t part of some revenge crusade, but rather intended to eliminate any confusion between his forthcoming Iyo One headphones<\/a> and Altman\u2019s io.<\/p>\n

Trademark lawsuits are a dime a dozen, but this one has broken through for good reason. There\u2019s intense interest in what Altman and Ive are building (the first device apparently won\u2019t be an \u201cin-ear\u201d product or a \u201cwearable\u201d<\/a>), and the case is a Rorschach test for how you feel about Altman, who is undoubtedly polarizing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a massive change in opinion on the guy,\u201c Rugolo tells me of Altman. \u201cWhile I was meeting with them, I was under the spell of Sam Altman being a great entrepreneur and a really interesting person. That broke pretty instantly after their public announcement [of io].\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cAm I getting screwed here?\u201d Rugolo recalls thinking. \u201cWhen I talked to him on the phone and he made a Sopranos threat to sue me, I was just like, \u2018Alright, this guy is a bad dude.\u2019\u201d Now, he says that Altman is trying to \u201cmanipulate the arguments in the public sphere\u201d and \u201cmake me look like a money grubber or a sore loser, and I just don\u2019t think it\u2019s gonna work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a baseless trademark dispute and not a case about stolen ideas or technology,\u201d OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood<\/strong> says in a statement shared with me. \u201cIyo demoed a product in May 2025 that didn\u2019t function properly or meet our standards in hopes that we\u2019d acquire Iyo. We passed. Jason Rugolo was also well aware of the io name and never raised concerns before our announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to the millions of dollars he recently raised from his manufacturer, Pegatron, and a billionaire whom he refuses to name, Rugolo says Iyo has enough runway to last it through the end of 2026. When I ask if the device he teased in his viral TED talk<\/a> last year is indeed shipping later this year, he says he\u2019s about to fly to China to \u201cbasically be living at the factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he\u2019s ready to go through the legal discovery process and take his case to trial, he hopes that OpenAI will \u201cput their guns away\u201d and \u201ccomplete like grown-ups on product.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI will meet them in the market,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWe will both try to launch stuff that\u2019s really cool and see if we can serve our customers. They\u2019ll just compete fairly and stop using the name. They have some of the best designers in the world, apparently. Think of a new name. You just can\u2019t use the one that I told you about already, and that I\u2019ve been using since 2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Crist\u00f3bal<\/a><\/p>\n

Crist\u00f3bal Valenzuela. Getty Images \/ The Verge<\/p>\n

So far, Runway is known for bringing generative AI to Hollywood<\/a>. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming industry.<\/p>\n

This week, I was granted access to a new interactive gaming experience that Runway plans to make available to everyone as soon as next week, according to CEO Crist\u00f3bal Valenzuela<\/strong>. The consumer-facing product is currently quite barebones, with a chat interface that supports only text and image generation, but Valenzuela says that generated video games are coming later this year. He says that Runway is also in talks with gaming companies about both using its technology and accessing their datasets for training.<\/p>\n

Based on his recent conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming industry is in a similar position to Hollywood when it was first introduced to generative AI. There was considerable resistance, but over time, AI has been gradually adopted in more areas of the production process. Valenzuela says Amazon\u2019s recent show, House of David, was made in part with Runway\u2019s technology, and that his company is working with \u201cpretty much every major studio\u201d and \u201cmost of the Fortune 100 companies.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can help a studio make a movie 40 percent faster, then we\u2019re probably gonna be able to help developers of games make games faster,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re waking up, and they\u2019re moving faster than I would say the studios were moving two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Naturally, I couldn\u2019t let Valenzuela get off our Zoom call without asking him about his recent acquisition talks<\/a> with Zuckerberg: \u201cI think we have more interesting intellectual challenges being independent, and remaining independent for now.\u201d <\/p>\n

No one knows what AGI actually means.<\/strong> That much is clear from this excellent deep dive from The Information<\/a> into Microsoft\u2019s deal with OpenAI. There has been a lot of good reporting on the negotiations between the two companies, but this piece is the most comprehensive and detailed I\u2019ve seen yet. It states that Microsoft will no longer receive exclusive access to OpenAI\u2019s IP if it achieves \u201csufficient AGI,\u201d which is contractually defined as when OpenAI\u2019s board determines that the AI \u201chas the capability to generate\u201d the maximum profits its investors are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn\u2019t have to actually generate these profits. <\/p>\n

Two under-the-radar deals:<\/strong> Although they haven\u2019t garnered many headlines, OpenAI announced an interesting partnership and a small acquisition this week. The first is a deal with Applied Intuition<\/a> to \u201cadvance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in vehicles.\u201d The second is the acquisition of the small team at Crossing Minds<\/a>, an AI startup that helped e-commerce companies offer more personalized product recommendations. \u201cPersonally, joining OpenAI\u2019s research team to focus on agents and information retrieval is a unique honor,\u201d Crossing Minds founder Alexandre Eobicque<\/strong> writes<\/a>. \u201cThese are precisely the problems I\u2019ve always been passionate about: how systems learn, reason, and retrieve knowledge at scale, in real-time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some interesting career moves in tech:<\/p>\n