'Missionaries will beat mercenaries': OpenAI CEO criticized Meta for hunting for AI footage

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, has spoken out against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to poach artificial intelligence talent. In a letter to the company's employees, as written by Wired, Altman said Meta's actions «look pretty distasteful.»

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has criticized Meta's efforts to hire artificial intelligence development employees, saying such actions could lead to «serious cultural problems» in the future. Altman said this in a letter to OpenAI employees, which is quoted by Wired.

«We've gone from a bunch of nerds in the corner to the most interesting people in the tech industry (at least). AI-Twitter is toxic; Meta is behaving in a way that looks pretty obnoxious; I think things are going to get even crazier from here on out. When I was fired and then brought back, I said this isn't the craziest thing to happen in OpenAI history; and it definitely isn't,» he wrote in the messenger Slack.

Altman's reaction was prompted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he was creating a new team to develop superintelligence and that several OpenAI employees were moving there. OpenAI chief scientist Mark Chen, as written by Wired, told colleagues that it felt like «someone broke into our house and stole something.»

In a post on Monday, Altman chose a different tone when talking about these reshuffles. 

«Certainly Meta has attracted some great employees, but overall it's hard to overstate the fact that they haven't been able to get our best - they've had to move pretty far down their list; they've been trying to poach someone for a very long time now, and I've lost count of how many people from here they've tried to talk into becoming their chief scientist. I'm proud of how mission-oriented our entire industry is; of course, there will always be mercenaries,» he noted in a statement to Wired.

«Missionaries» will eventually defeat «mercenaries,» Altman added, and noted that OpenAI is considering a compensation review for the entire research team.

«I think OpenAI stock has much more upside potential than Meta stock,» he wrote. - But I think it's important that big growth only comes after big success; what Meta is doing, in my opinion, will lead to very serious cultural problems.»

Altman encouraged the team to stay with OpenAI, emphasizing that the company has a unique culture, a strong team and a clear plan to build a shared artificial intelligence, which remains its top priority, unlike other companies. 

«Other companies treat it more as a means to achieve some other goals. But for us it's the most important thing, and it always will be. Long after Meta has switched to its next trendy topic or is busy defending its social niche, we will still be here - day after day, year after year - figuring out how to do our job better than anyone else time after time,» he believes.

Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, June 30 announced to employees that the company's AI research will continue in a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). It will be led by former Scale AI startup CEO Alexander Wang and former GitHub head Nat Friedman. The list of new employees also includes several people from OpenAI: Shengjia Zhao, Shuqiao Bi, Jiahui Yu and Hongyu Ren, Wired writes.

As told by Sam Altman in one of his podcasts, Meta was offering his employees up to $100 million in climbing bonuses. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, on CNBC's June 20 broadcast, stated that the talent market situation is really incredible and unprecedented in his 20-year career in tech.

OpenAI remains a non-public company and is not publicly traded, unlike Meta. In late March, OpenAI announced that it had closed a $40 billion funding round, making it the largest ever fundraising by a private technology company. The deal valued the entire OpenAI at $300 billion dollars. The funding amounted to $30 billion from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and $10 billion from a pool of other investors.

Shares of Meta have priced nearly 23% since the beginning of the year. Analysts' consensus target price is $714.9, down nearly one percent from the current price target.

Meta stock has been rated by 73 analysts. Of these, 63 recommend buying (Buy and Overweight), eight recommend holding (Hold) and only two recommend selling (Underweight and Sell).

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor