The rift between Meta and OpenAI seems to be far from over. Meta recently released its list of AI researchers that were poached from OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who had earlier expressed his displeasure with Meta’s transgressions, seems to have been hitting back. According to a report in Wired, Altman, in an internal memo to OpenAI researchers, said, “missionaries will beat mercenaries.”
Reportedly, Altman has called Meta’s poaching ‘distasteful’ in a Slack to his team. The CEO claimed that Meta has missed top targets and went “far down their list”. Altman also reportedly warned of the cultural problems from poaching, adding that salaries are being evaluated and that OpenAI stock has “much, much more upside”.
“We have gone from some nerds in the corner to the most interesting people in the tech industry (at least),” he wrote on Slack. “AI Twitter is toxic; Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful; I assume things will get even crazier in the future. After I got fired and came back, I said that was not the craziest thing that would happen in OpenAI history; certainly neither is this,” read the leaked memo.
In his note sent on Monday, June 30, Altman said that while Meta may have gotten a few great people, they have settled for people quite far down their list. He also wrote that Meta has been trying to recruit people for a long time and that he has lost track of how many people from OpenAI the Zuckerberg-led tech giant tried to get to be their ‘Chief Scientist’.
“I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries,” he wrote. Altman wrote that missionaries will beat mercenaries, adding that the company is assessing compensation for the entire research organisation.
Altman’s comments come at a time when Meta relayed a memo introducing the company’s new superintelligence team, which will be led by Alexandr Wang of Scale AI and former GitHub leader Nat Friedman. Wang took to his X account to announce new joinees at Meta as part of the superintelligence team. While Wang shared the list of new researchers on X, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg reportedly introduced the members of the artificial superintelligence team in an internal memo to all employees.
Zuckerberg had earlier said that the overall organisation will be called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) and that it will include all Meta foundations, products, and fair teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of Meta’s AI models.
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