"Sam Altman says Meta offered $100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees :”
“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them, as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its artificial intelligence strategy."
Source Reuters Morning News Call 18-06-2025
We will likely never know if this is true,whether Meta has tried to poach key staff from OpenAI?
And if they did, did they really wave a $100 million cheque as an incentive to jump ship.
Most intriguing of all, if they did offer that extraordinary sum of money, what strings were attached to it?
Because for many people, if you get a payday of that magnitude, you are probably not going to be trying too hard thereafter, or am I wrong?
Source: Our World in Data
Why might Meta offer 9 figures to potential new recruits?
When the average salary at the firm is estimated to be $379,000. $100 million is roughly 26.50 times that figure.
To answer that we need to think about who they may have been trying to recruit.
Likely as not they would have been senior engineers skilled in the “dark arts” of AI programming, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering and other niche skills required to construct, maintain, and run the next generation of AIs.
By its own admission the company that owns Face Book, Whats App and Instagram is ramping up its AI capabilities.
For example it just spent $15.0 billion on a 49.0% stake in Scale AI, a firm that provides AI developers with specialist tools needed to build generative AIs and to scale them rapidly.
ScaleAI customers included Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, a real who’s who of AI.
Meta has also taken the boss of Scale AI under its wing.
The 28 year old Alexandr Wang, a former room mate of Sam Altmans, will move to Meta full time and join, and most likely head up, a team that will try to build an AI super intelligence.
As Bloomberg put it
“Scale AI’s Wang brings to Meta knowledge of what everyone else is going (in AI)”
As if to validate that comment,Google, Scale AIs largest customer, announced that it was ending its relationship with Scale soon after the news of the Meta investment broke.
Suddenly $100.0 million doesn't seem like a big price to pay if you can achieve first mover advantage in this area.
Furthermore is there any point in being second or third in this race?
Chasing Unicorns
Of course there are many projects that are aiming to change the face of human existence.
They include the quest for limitless energy from sustainable fusion, hypersonic flight, stable and reliable quantum computers, and the ability to accurately forecast the fluctuations within the stock market.
All which have remained tantalisingly out of reach during my lifetime and that might well be the case with the pursuit of a super intelligence.
Though if one were to be developed might it perhaps solve the problems that confront scientists and developers involved in those other projects and more besides.
Let’s not forget though that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten carried away before.
Does anybody remember the Metaverse?
As of April 2024 Meta Platforms had ploughed at least $46.0 billion into augmented and virtual reality since 202, but had only generated revenues of $6.0 billion. according to news articles hosted on Nasdaq.com.
Meta could afford to do this, and splash the cash now, on its pursuit of AI, because of the growth of online advertising.
And the ability of its social media platforms to attract advertisers and monetize the actions of its users.
In 2024 Meta generated more than $160.0 billion from ad revenues.
Source: Statista
New outlets
Meta now wants to start offering advertising on WhatsApp, its messaging platform that has 1.50 billion
users worldwide, and this could open up other highly lucrative avenues for the company. Although Meta must be careful not to alienate users by bombarding them with unwanted ads.
However, if it could serve a more targeted/curated selection of ads that match or align with a users, interests then that could be a very different matter.
Source:Barchart.com
Reaction
My initial reaction to the Sam Altman story above was that it was a “sell signal” for Meta.
Mindful of the fact that the investment in and the poor returns from the Metaverse saw the firm shed two thirds of its share price.
Could Meta do better by improving and expanding its online advertising business?.
Perhaps offering an AI content creation service to advertisers, influencers and alike, rather than chasing a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Now the whole point of this article hasn't really been about Meta, rather it's been about what we consider to be valuable and worth pursuing.
Is a slightly “boring “ business, that generates up to US $160.0 billion in revenue per annum with a 41.0% margin, and room to grow, the strategy to pursue?
Or should you YOLO and chase a dream, like super intelligent AIs?
The ad business at Meta is analogous to systematic rules based trading. Seemingly dull and repetitive but very effective if done well.
Whilst the pursuit of a super AI can be compared to a trader who wants to make it rich from one big hit.
I am still waiting to fly to Australia in 60 minutes, or to have free power from fusion reactors that can run on sea water, but while I wait I’ll keep my systematic, rules based analysis of the equity markets running because that works in the here and now.
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