Already in the AI industry defined by large-scale financing, record recovery model release and global regulator Shodown, a new front has opened up and this time it is deeply individual. In a clear podcast call, Open ai CEO Sam Altman revealed that Facebook and Instagram’s original company Mata has offered a bonus that includes a bonus of up to $ 100 million per employee to prove Openii’s top scientists.
These comments came during an episode of Unaccapped, a podcast organized by Altman’s brother. It seemed like a derogatory comment that a technical industry was quickly spiraling into firearms, as the observers realized the implications: Meta is no longer just building AI models. It builds an army. And this is willing to pay a fortune to do this.
“They started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said. “You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year.”
Altman also said that, so far, none of OpenAI’s top talent has accepted Meta’s offer. But the signal is clear: the most valuable resource in today’s AI race isn’t GPUs or data—it’s human capital.
Behind the Money | Meta’s Pivot to Superintelligence
Meta’s ambition to dominate AI isn’t new, but its latest moves are more aggressive than ever. Just days before Altman’s remarks, Meta confirmed a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a leading data-labeling startup, and appointed its founder, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new internal initiative focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI)—dubbed the Superintelligence team.
It’s a calculated shift. In recent months, Meta’s once-lauded open-source approach to AI development has slowed. Launches have been delayed. Internal talent has departed. Meanwhile, competitors like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and China’s DeepSeek have surged forward.
For Meta, the time to catch up is now and it has chosen an approach straight from Silicon Valley’s oldest playbook: acquire brilliance at any cost.
The War for Talent Is No Longer a Metaphor
In the early 2010s, tech firms competed for software developers with stock options and catered lunches. Today, they’re offering compensation packages that rival startup funding rounds. The price tag of $100 million per hire isn’t just high. It’s unprecedented.
But it’s not without precedent in logic. In the AI world, the difference between a state-of-the-art model and a merely competitive one can lie in the minds of a few elite researchers. Engineers at the frontier who built GPT, scaled reinforcement learning, or optimized training pipelines aren’t just employees. They’re strategic assets.
Meta’s outreach to OpenAI engineers, as confirmed by Altman, is the clearest sign yet that individual contributors have become the most valuable currency in the AI economy. These offers aren’t aimed at middle management. They’re aimed at people capable of inventing the next GPT-level leap.
A Clash of Cultures as Much as Code
What’s remarkable isn’t just that Meta made these offers—it’s that they’ve so far failed. OpenAI’s staff, according to Altman, has held firm. That could reflect more than just loyalty. It might be about mission, internal equity, or the kind of culture OpenAI has carefully cultivated since its founding.
There’s also a broader narrative at play: the contrast between OpenAI, a company often framed as focused on responsible AGI development, and Meta, which is increasingly seen as focused on aggressive scale and commercial domination.
Altman even commented that Meta seems to view OpenAI as its top competitor—a statement that says as much about Meta’s strategic concerns as it does about OpenAI’s influence.
The role of India in talent
While the battle plays in the boardroom in San Francisco and Palo Alto, the implications are global especially for India. Indian engineers, researchers and computer scientists create an important spine in the global AI labor force. Wages and signatures touch the sky in the form of bonuses, so Indian talent is an incentive to go abroad or to join foreign laboratories.
India’s own AI ecosystem compared to Silicon Valley should also struggle with a hard truth: Top talent will always follow the opportunity, and the opportunity is quickly linked to global players with a budget of billions of dollars.
The question for Indian start -up, research institutes and decision makers is whether we can build an ecosystem, which is strong enough to compete – not only at cost price, but also on creativity, ambition and vision.
strong enough to compete not just on cost, but on creativity, ambition, and vision.
What Happens Next?
The revelation of Meta’s $100 million offers marks a shift in how the AI industry will evolve in the second half of this decade. If researchers are valued like elite athletes, will we begin to see free agency models for top AI talent? Will venture-backed labs compete directly with Big Tech for the same people? And more importantly can money alone secure true innovation?
Altman’s comments hint at a deeper lesson: even in a world driven by technology, the human element is irreplaceable.
And as the race toward AGI intensifies, companies may learn that while models can be trained in weeks, the culture that builds them takes years to earn and moments to lose.
