OpenAI Urges Employees to Reject Metas Absurd Recruitment Offers Amid Talent War

The Chief Scientist at OpenAI, Mark Chen, sent out a memorandum to staff urging them to decline job offers from Meta. The memo, which was shared on the company’s Slack, was obtained by Wired.

OpenAI resorted to these retention measures after Meta successfully lured away several employees from the ChatGPT developer. In mid-June, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, disclosed that Meta was attempting to attract his company’s personnel with offers of $100 million and additional bonuses. Subsequently, three founders of OpenAI’s Zurich office—Lukas Bayer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhao—joined Meta.

By the end of June, Meta hired OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal to work on artificial intelligence models within its AI Superintelligence division. Following this, four leading AI researchers from OpenAI—Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren, Shuchao Bi, and Shengjia Zhao—all of whom contributed to models like GPT-4.1, o3, and o1, along with multimodal post-processing, left for Meta.

“I currently feel a sense of loss, as if someone has intruded into our home and taken something valuable. Please trust that we have not been idle,” Chen wrote in the internal memo.

Chen, alongside Altman and other OpenAI executives, are working on revising the compensation system and exploring creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. One OpenAI leader stated that if Meta recruiters apply pressure with “ridiculous offers,” employees should refuse them.

Wired’s source mentioned that Meta has significantly ramped up its recruitment of researchers, focusing particularly on talent from OpenAI and Google. While Meta views Anthropic as a key competitor, they believe that the personnel there would fit less well into their corporate culture, according to the source.

One OpenAI executive encouraged employees to reach out if they receive offers from Meta. Currently, some OpenAI employees are putting in 80-hour workweeks. Next week, OpenAI plans to pause operations to allow staff to recharge. OpenAI anticipates that during this period, Meta will intensify its efforts to attract employees. Chen reminded the team that they should concentrate on their primary goal: developing general artificial intelligence.

_{*Meta Platforms has been designated as an extremist organization, with its activities banned in Russia}