Big AI Lures Talent With Huge Pay: Meta’s hiring spree raised compensation for top AI engineers and executives

Leading AI companies fought a ferocious war for talent, luring top talent from competitors with levels of compensation more commonly associated with pro sports.

What happened: In July, Meta launched a hiring spree to staff the new Meta Superintelligence Labs, offering up to hundreds of millions of dollars to researchers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other top AI companies. The offers included large cash bonuses and compensation for equity forfeited by leaving another company. Meta’s rivals, in turn, poached key employees from Meta and each other, driving up the market value of AI talent to unprecedented levels.

Driving the story: Meta upended traditional pay structures by offering pay packages worth as much as $300 million over four years with liquid compensation that sometimes vastly exceeded the stock options that, at other companies, vest over many years. Having hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and key members of his team, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg compiled a wish list, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

• Zuckerberg made house calls to convince people to jump ship, sometimes bringing homemade soup. The effort netted, among others, OpenAI’s Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung, two researchers who worked on reasoning models.
• Andrew Tulloch, who had co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with OpenAI’s ex-CTO Mira Murati, initially turned down a package at Meta that included bonuses worth $1.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. A few months later, he changed his mind and joined Meta.
• Meta hired Ruoming Pang, who oversaw AI models at Apple. The pay package came to hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, Bloomberg reported. Meta’s offer exceeded the pay packages of top Apple leaders who weren’t its CEO, and Apple declined to counter it.
• Amid the turnover, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman took more than 20 researchers and engineers from Google, including Amar Subramanya, who was vice president of engineering.
• Elon Musk’s xAI hired over a dozen AI researchers and engineers from Meta. Musk decried his rival’s “insane” offers and touted his company’s “hyper merit-based” culture and greater potential for growth of equity.

Behind the news: The trajectory of salaries for AI engineers reflects AI’s evolution from academic curiosity to revolutionary technology. 

• In 2011, when Google Brain started under the direction of Andrew Ng, AI talent was concentrated in academia. As neural networks found their way into commercial products like search engines and AI assistants, machine learning engineer roles became a standard corporate tier.
• In 2014, when Google acquired DeepMind, AI salaries significantly outpaced those in software engineering in general. DeepMind’s staffing costs came to around $345,000 per employee, The New York Times estimated. By 2017, when Google introduced the transformer architecture, top compensation had risen as high as $500,000.
• Circa 2023, with the rise of ChatGPT compensation took another jump. Pay packages for top-level software engineers reached beyond $700,000, according to one report.

Where things stand: As 2026 begins, the AI hiring landscape is much changed. To fend off recruiters, OpenAI has offered more stock-based compensation than its competitors, accelerated the vesting schedule for stock options awarded to new employees, and handed out retention bonuses as high as $1.5 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. Despite talk of an AI bubble in 2025, high salaries are rational for companies that plan to spend tens of billions of dollars to build AI data centers: If you’re spending that much on hardware, why not spend a small percentage of the outlay on salaries?