Mark Chen, the Chief Research Officer at Openai, sent a strong self to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This self, which was sent to Openai employees in Slack and acquired by Wired, came days after Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited Four senior researchers of the company to join the Superintelligent Laboratory of Meta.
“I feel a visceral feeling now, as if someone broke into our home and stole something,” Chen wrote. “Please trust that we didn’t sit safely.”
Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, Openai’s general manager, and other bosses at the company “around the clock to talk to those with bids”, adding, “we were more inactive than ever before, we recalibrate Comp, and we exhibit creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.”
However, even though Openai guidance seems desperate to keep his staff, Chen said he has “high personal standards of justice”, and wants to keep the highest talent with that in mind. “As long as I fight to keep each of you, I won’t do that at the price of justice to others,” he wrote.
The news comes because competition for top AI -researchers are heating into Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg was particularly aggressive in his way of action, offering $ 100 million signing bonuses to some Openai employees, according to comments that Altman made on podcast with his brotherJack Altman. Multiple sources at Openai with direct knowledge of the bids confirmed the number. The Meta -General Director also personally reached possible recruits, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Over the past month, Meta aggressively built its new AI effort, and several times (and mostly unsuccessfully) have tried to recruit some of our strongest talents with computer packages,” Chen wrote on Slack.
A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed that the company has significantly crawled its research, with a particular eye to Openai and Google’s talent. AnthropicAlthough also a top rival, it is thought less than a culture suitable at Meta, one source tells Wired. “They didn’t necessarily increase the group, but for the highest talent, the sky is the limit,” the source says.
Both Openai and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
Chen’s note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company, where they wrote notes to employees in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader in the research team encouraged staff to achieve if they received a Meta offer: “If they press you, or make ridiculous explosive offers, just tell them that they don’t like, don’t like to press people into perhaps the most important decision. Wired does not appoint the boss, because they are not C-suite executive.
