Meta wanted to hire OpenAI talent

Meta has acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI and hired co-founder Alexandr Wang to form a team that will be tasked with developing a superintelligence. Sam Altman said on a podcast with his brother Jack that some OpenAI talent has received offers from the Menlo Park company, but has declined. According to Bloomberg , OpenAI will end its partnership with Scale AI.

Following the blunder made by Meta with the new Llama 4 models (a “trick” was used to obtain a high score in the LMArena ranking), Mark Zuckerberg has decided to create a group of experts to develop the next AI models and therefore to recover ground on the competitors.

One of the team members will be Alexandr Wang. According to Bloomberg , there will also be Jack Rae (Google DeepMind) and Johan Schalkwyk (Sesame AI). Zuckerberg, on the other hand, did not convince Koray Kavukcuoglu (Google DeepMind) and Noam Brown (OpenAI).

During the podcast, Sam Altman confirmed that some OpenAI employees were contacted by Meta. The Menlo Park company offered a $100 million bonus upon signing the contract, but no one accepted. According to Altman, the employees contacted by Meta assessed that OpenAI has a higher probability of achieving superintelligence.

The CEO added that the Menlo Park company is unable to innovate. While Zuckerberg continues to search for talent, OpenAI is working at full speed and in the coming months will release an open source model that will compete with those of Meta.

Bloomberg sources revealed that OpenAI will cut ties with Scale AI. It will no longer use its data to train models. Google, Microsoft, and xAI will likely do the same.