Meta isn’t just luring top OpenAI researchers with some mind-boggling salary numbers — it’s also not giving them much time to decide whether they want to take up the offers or not.
OpenAI’s head of recruiting has said that Meta is giving its employees “exploding offers” in a bid to recruit them. These exploding offers typically offer a large salary and joining bonus — rumoured to be as much as $100 million — but are valid for a very short period of time. Faced with the prospect of making generational wealth, many OpenAI researchers seem to have jumped ship to Meta over the last few weeks.
“It’s unethical (and reeks of desperation) to give people “exploding offers” that expire within hours, and to ask them to sign before they even have a chance to tell their current manager. Meta, you know better than this. Put people first,” OpenAI’s Head of Recruiting Joaquin Quiñonero Candela posted on X. “For the record: deadlines on offer are fake. If they want you, you can always get more time to think,” he added.
“It really depends on the context,” Candela said to an X user who asked whether OpenAI also gave deadlines to candidates while recruiting them. “The spirit of it is not to force people to make a decision within hours, give them time to reflect and talk to whoever they want,” he said.
Two weeks ago, OpenAI had managed to snag as many as 8 top researchers from OpenAI. These included Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, who were responsible for establishing OpenAI’s office in Zurich, Switzerland last year. In addition, Meta had snagged Trapit Bansal, who had worked closely with Ilya Sutskever on reasoning models. Meta had also managed to pull away Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren, Shuchao Bi and Shengjia Zhao, all of whom had worked on some of OpenAI’s biggest models.
OpenAI now seems to be claiming that these researchers were poached through “exploding offers” which it calls unethical. It does seem that giving a short deadline would make it harder for people to refuse an offer that gives them life-changing wealth. But the AI space has been brutally competitive in recent years, and the top labs have been trying all kinds of means to lure the best talent. And amid this frenzy which $100 million signing bonuses and billions of dollars of valuations for companies with no products or services, all currently seems to be fair in love and AI.