Meta’s AI Talent Raid: Luring OpenAI’s Top Minds in 2025’s Tech War

Silicon Valley's talent arms race heats up as Meta aggressively recruits OpenAI's brightest.

The AI Brain Drain

Zuckerberg's empire is vacuuming up machine learning experts—offering salaries that make even crypto bull run bonuses look conservative. Sources say the poaching campaign has intensified since Q1 2025, though neither company will confirm numbers.

OpenAI's Exodus Problem

When your researchers keep defecting to the social media giant, maybe it's time to rethink those equity packages. Or perhaps just accept that in today's market, AI talent flows where the deep pockets—and data centers—are deepest.

Bonus jab: At least someone's still willing to pay for top tech talent after that last metaverse write-down.

Meta swings to become the leader in AI

An OpenAI spokesman confirmed that the three employees had left the company but gave no additional details. Meta did not immediately comment on the hirings.

Meanwhile, despite being seen as a leader in open-source AI, Meta has faced talent losses and setbacks in rolling out new models to rival those from Google, OpenAI, and China’s DeepSeek.

Altman mentioned hearing that Meta views them as their main rival. 

Recently, Meta brought on board 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, to focus on its “superintelligence” projects. The company also invested $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% share in Scale AI. 

Now, Meta is attempting to shift its strategy as reports indicate that Zuckerberg is assembling a group of specialists to work towards what is known as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). 

According to reports, Zuckerberg’s efforts to recruit around 50 people, including a new head of AI research for the AGI team, are driven partly by frustration over the performance and reception of Meta’s latest large language model, Llama 4.

Meta delayed the release of the new LLM version after Llama 4 failed to meet internal benchmarks, especially in areas like reasoning and math. According to data from sources, Llama 4 was also less capable of humanlike voice conversations than OpenAI’s models.

Rivals such as OpenAI have also been considering changes to attract more investment in pursuing AGI.

Meta intends to invest up to $65 billion this year to grow its AI infrastructure, as investors are pushing major tech companies to deliver profits from their investments. 

Tech firms seek superstar researchers amid the growing competition for AI talent

Meta’s recruitment efforts represent the latest signs of a scramble to hire top engineers to develop AI models. The competition for AI talent is heating up to the point where superstar researchers are being wooed like professional athletes amid a faith that individual contributors have the power to make or break companies.

During an Uncapped podcast episode that aired on Tuesday, June 17, the CEO of OpenAI revealed to his brother, the host, that Meta began to make huge offers to many people on their team.

Altman further stated that besides the employees being offered huge signing bonuses, they were also promised even more yearly pay. According to him, none of their top talent had chosen to accept those offers at the time.

Reports indicate that Zuckerberg has been firing off emails and WhatsApp messages to the sharpest minds in artificial intelligence in a frenzied effort to play catch-up. He has contacted hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars and entrepreneurs to get them to join the new superintelligence lab. Some people who received the messages were so surprised that they didn’t believe it was Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, Altman has been on a spending spree of his own, paying billions for former Apple designer Jony Ive’s startup.

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