Meta’s Hiring Spree Pushes Up Salaries for AI Engineers Across the Industry

Publicly reported compensation for AI talent has skyrocketed in the wake of Meta’s recent hiring spree.

What’s new: Since forming Meta Superintelligence Labs in June, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hired AI executives for pay packages worth as much as $300 million over four years, Wired reported. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said such statements were false and that the company’s pay packages had been “misrepresented all over the place.” Nonetheless, having seen valued employees jump to Meta, OpenAI began sweetening its compensation.

How it works: Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told employees, “We have a small number of leadership roles that we’re hiring for, and those people do command a premium.”

Meta agreed to pay Ruoming Pang, who formerly headed Apple's efforts to build foundation models, a package worth $200 million over several years, Bloomberg reported. That figure exceeds Apple’s pay scale for any employee except CEO Tim Cook.
Much attention has focused on offers of $100 million, a figure first cited by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in mid-June, who told the Uncapped podcast that Meta had enticed OpenAI staff with signing bonuses of that magnitude. Meta’s Bosworth told employees that the company had offered $100 million to some new hires not as a signing bonus, but as total compensation, according to Wired. Wired further reported, without attribution, that Meta offered $100 million as total compensation for the first year in larger, multi-year deals.
To lure Alexandr Wang and members of his team, Meta invested $14.3 billion into Wang’s Scale AI. Before hiring former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former Github CEO Nat Friedman, Zuckerberg agreed to acquire NFDG, a venture capital firm the pair cofounded. Gross will lead Meta’s AI products division. Friedman will co-lead Meta Superintelligence Labs with Wang.
Meta has hired at least 16 new scientists or engineers who formerly worked at companies including Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI. OpenAI gave up 10 of them, including ChatGPT creator Shengjia Zhao and vision transformer co-author Lucas Beyer. (None of them were offered $300 million.) Google lost pretraining technical lead Jack Rae, speech-recognition specialist Johan Schalkwyk, and Gemini researcher Pei Sun, Reuters reported.
The new hires receive a signing bonus, base salary, and Meta stock, according to Bloomberg. Stock grants are typically tied to performance and may take more than the usual four years to vest, so an employee who leaves before then may forfeit shares. In addition, Meta may vary payouts depending on its share price at the time.

Rival reaction: OpenAI responded to Meta’s hiring campaign with an internal memo to employees in which chief research officer March Chen said executives were “recalibrating” compensation and considering other ways to reward the most valued employees. OpenAI was already grappling with rising compensation. Stock-based compensation has grown more than 5 times last year to $4.4 billion — substantially more than total revenue during that period — The Information reported.

Why it matters: By recruiting aggressively to get an edge in the race to achieve AI breakthroughs, Meta is not only poaching its rivals’ top employees, it’s also boosting pay scales throughout the AI industry. The sky-high offers highlight the rarity of people with the right combination of technical knowledge, practical experience, and market savvy.

We’re thinking: Meta’s core business is selling ads to be shown to users who engage with user-generated content. Generative AI has the potential to disrupt this business in many different ways; for instance, by offering AI-generated content. Meta’s heavy investment in AI is bold but rational. We wish the growing Meta team every success!