Meta says it’s winning the talent war with OpenAI

Throughout a company-wide all-hands assembly on Thursday, a few of Meta’s high executives have been requested in regards to the “$100 million signing bonuses” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed they’d been providing to poach his workers.

“Sam is simply being dishonest right here,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, mentioned on the assembly when requested about Altman’s remarks. “He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for each single individual… Look, you guys, the market’s sizzling. It’s not that sizzling.”

The “$100 million bonus” headline has rightfully grow to be a meme on social media since Altman mentioned the quantity on his brother’s podcast. “What Sam neglects to say is that he’s countering all these presents, making a small marketplace for a really, very small variety of people who find themselves for senior, senior management roles” within the new superintelligence AI crew Meta is constructing, Bosworth informed Meta workers at present. “That isn’t the overall factor that’s occurring within the AI area. And naturally, he’s not mentioning what the precise phrases of the provide are. It’s not [a] sign-on bonus. It’s all these various things.”

Bosworth then referenced latest tales a few handful of OpenAI researchers who’re becoming a member of Meta and mentioned there are “fairly a couple of extra within the pipeline that I can’t announce or share proper now.”

“Sam is thought to magnify, and on this case, I do know precisely why he’s doing it, which is as a result of we’re succeeding at getting expertise from OpenAI,” he mentioned. “He’s not very blissful about that.”

On the Thursday assembly, there have been many workers current from the corporate’s engineering “bootcamp,” a multi-week onboarding program that assigns new hires to numerous groups. “For all the brand new bootcampers right here, you didn’t screw up,” Bosworth mentioned to laughs and claps from the viewers. “You made an amazing resolution. Comp is true the place it needs to be.”

Bosworth wasn’t the one Meta exec to say OpenAI in the course of the inside assembly. CPO Chris Cox additionally acknowledged that, whereas Meta AI has one billion month-to-month customers, engagement “just isn’t almost as deep as the best way that persons are utilizing ChatGPT.” The standalone Meta AI app has solely 450,000 each day customers, he informed workers, and “lots of these of us” are utilizing it to handle their Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

“We’re not going to go proper after ChatGPT and try to do a greater job with serving to you write your emails at work,” Cox mentioned. “We have to differentiate right here by not focusing obsessively on productiveness, which is what you see Anthropic and OpenAI and Google doing. We’re going to go give attention to leisure, on reference to buddies, on how individuals dwell their lives, on all the issues that we uniquely do nicely, which is a giant a part of the technique going ahead.”

Meta declined to touch upon the interior assembly.

After I spoke with Jason Rugolo on Thursday, I needed to know why he’s suing essentially the most influential firm in tech.

Rugolo’s AI system startup, Iyo, not too long ago received a brief restraining order that bars OpenAI from utilizing the “io” model for Sam Altman’s new {hardware} division with Jony Ive. In response, Altman took to his X account to recommend that Rugolo filed his trademark lawsuit as a result of OpenAI refused to put money into or purchase Iyo, which is gearing as much as launch its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this yr.

Rugolo acknowledges (and paperwork submitted to the court docket verify) that he pitched Altman on investing a number of occasions. He additionally mentioned an acquisition with io crew members this yr. Nonetheless, he says his lawsuit isn’t a part of some revenge campaign, however reasonably supposed to remove any confusion between his forthcoming Iyo One headphones and Altman’s io.

Trademark lawsuits are a dime a dozen, however this one has damaged by for good purpose. There’s intense curiosity in what Altman and Ive are constructing (the primary system apparently received’t be an “in-ear” product or a “wearable”), and the case is a Rorschach check for the way you’re feeling about Altman, who’s undoubtedly polarizing.

“I had an enormous change in opinion on the man,“ Rugolo tells me of Altman. “Whereas I used to be assembly with them, I used to be below the spell of Sam Altman being an amazing entrepreneur and a very attention-grabbing individual. That broke fairly immediately after their public announcement [of io].”

“Am I getting screwed right here?” Rugolo remembers considering. “After I talked to him on the cellphone and he made a Sopranos risk to sue me, I used to be identical to, ‘Alright, this man is a nasty dude.’” Now, he says that Altman is attempting to “manipulate the arguments within the public sphere” and “make me appear to be a cash grubber or a sore loser, and I simply don’t assume it’s gonna work.”

“It is a baseless trademark dispute and never a case about stolen concepts or know-how,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden says in an announcement shared with me. “Iyo demoed a product in Might 2025 that didn’t operate correctly or meet our requirements in hopes that we’d purchase Iyo. We handed. Jason Rugolo was additionally nicely conscious of the io title and by no means raised issues earlier than our announcement.”

Due to the tens of millions of {dollars} he not too long ago raised from his producer, Pegatron, and a billionaire whom he refuses to call, Rugolo says Iyo has sufficient runway to final it by the tip of 2026. After I ask if the system he teased in his viral TED speak final yr is certainly delivery later this yr, he says he’s about to fly to China to “mainly be dwelling on the manufacturing facility.”

Whereas he’s able to undergo the authorized discovery course of and take his case to trial, he hopes that OpenAI will “put their weapons away” and “full like grown-ups on product.”

“I’ll meet them out there,” he tells me. “We are going to each attempt to launch stuff that’s actually cool and see if we are able to serve our clients. They’ll simply compete pretty and cease utilizing the title. They’ve a few of the finest designers on the planet, apparently. Consider a brand new title. You simply can’t use the one which I informed you about already, and that I’ve been utilizing since 2019.”

To date, Runway is thought for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming trade.

This week, I used to be granted entry to a brand new interactive gaming expertise that Runway plans to make accessible to everybody as quickly as subsequent week, in accordance with CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The patron-facing product is at the moment fairly barebones, with a chat interface that helps solely textual content and picture technology, however Valenzuela says that generated video video games are coming later this yr. He says that Runway can be in talks with gaming firms about each utilizing its know-how and accessing their datasets for coaching.

Based mostly on his latest conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming trade is in the same place to Hollywood when it was first launched to generative AI. There was appreciable resistance, however over time, AI has been step by step adopted in additional areas of the manufacturing course of. Valenzuela says Amazon’s latest present, Home of David, was made partially with Runway’s know-how, and that his firm is working with “just about each main studio” and “many of the Fortune 100 firms.”

“If we might help a studio make a film 40 p.c quicker, then we’re most likely gonna be capable to assist builders of video games make video games quicker,” he says. “They’re waking up, and so they’re shifting quicker than I’d say the studios have been shifting two years in the past.”

Naturally, I couldn’t let Valenzuela get off our Zoom name with out asking him about his latest acquisition talks with Zuckerberg: “I feel we now have extra attention-grabbing mental challenges being unbiased, and remaining unbiased for now.”

Nobody is aware of what AGI really means. That a lot is obvious from this glorious deep dive from The Info into Microsoft’s take care of OpenAI. There was lots of good reporting on the negotiations between the 2 firms, however this piece is essentially the most complete and detailed I’ve seen but. It states that Microsoft will now not obtain unique entry to OpenAI’s IP if it achieves “ample AGI,” which is contractually outlined as when OpenAI’s board determines that the AI “has the potential to generate” the utmost income its traders are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn’t have to really generate these income.

Two under-the-radar offers: Though they haven’t garnered many headlines, OpenAI introduced an attention-grabbing partnership and a small acquisition this week. The primary is a take care of Utilized Instinct to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in autos.” The second is the acquisition of the small crew at Crossing Minds, an AI startup that helped e-commerce firms provide extra personalised product suggestions. “Personally, becoming a member of OpenAI’s analysis crew to give attention to brokers and knowledge retrieval is a novel honor,” Crossing Minds founder Alexandre Eobicque writes. “These are exactly the issues I’ve at all times been keen about: how methods study, purpose, and retrieve data at scale, in real-time.”

Some attention-grabbing profession strikes in tech:

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