The battle between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is heating up. It seems that Sam Altman is getting the fight that Elon Musk desired — only it's happening in the office where it belongs.
Quick recap of recent events: Last month Meta launched its new “Superintelligence team” focused on building AGI systems and began poaching high-profile OpenAI researchers with $100M compensation packages. So far Meta has reportedly enticed at least eight engineers from OpenAI to join its team.
Flash forward to last week and Sam Altman is going on the defense.
Altman wrote a memo to all OpenAI researchers, pitching why staying at the company is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence and hinting that OpenAI is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization. He dismissed Meta's recruiting efforts, claiming that what the company is doing could lead to deep cultural problems in the future.
Altman wrote:
“We have gone from some nerds in the corner to the most interesting people in the tech industry (at least). AI Twitter is toxic; Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful; I assume things will get even crazier in the future. After I got fired and came back I said that was not the craziest thing that would happen in OpenAl history; certainly neither is this.”
He noted that Meta has not gotten their “top people:”
“Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list; they have been trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I've lost track of how many people from here they've tried to get to be their Chief Scientist. I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries.”
He went on to make an emotional plea about how OpenAI is a mission-driven organization, even though it's simultaneously actively looking to convert into a for-profit organization:
“Missionaries will beat mercenaries. I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock. But I think it's important that huge upside comes after huge success; what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it's very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target.”
Lastly he slammed Mark Zuckerberg for jumping from one trend to another:
“And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way. Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be. Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here, day after day, year after year, figuring out how to do what we do better than anyone else. A lot of other efforts will rise and fall too.”
Shots fired!