Meta is offering multimillion-dollar pay for AI researchers, but not $100M ‘signing bonuses’

Meta definitely offers remuneration packages of several million dollars to AI researchers when they crowned them in its new superintendent laboratory. But no one really receives a “signing bonus of $ 100 million, according to a poached researcher and comments from an internal meeting disclosed.

During a meeting of all the hands on the scale of the company Thursday on the edgeSome of the Meta senior executives were interviewed Bonus that the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, said Meta had offered the best researchers.

Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth suggested that only a few people for high management roles may have been offered this kind of money, but clarified “the real terms of the offer” was not a “connection bonus. These are all these different things ”. In other words, not an instantaneous piece of money. Technological companies generally offer the largest pieces of their salary to the high leaders of the subsidies of the restricted stock unit (RSU), depending on the occupancy or performance measures.

A total salary pack over four years worth around $ 100 million for a very senior leader is not inconceivable for Meta. Most Meta’s named officersIncluding Bosworth, have gained total compensation between $ 20 million and almost $ 24 million a year for years.

Altman “suggested that we do this for each person,” said Bosworth at the meeting. “Listen, you guys, the market is hot. It’s not that hot.” (Meta did not immediately respond to our request for comments.)

Thursday, researcher Lucas Beyer confirmed that he was leaving Openai to join Meta With the other two who led the OpenAi Zurich office. He tweeted: “1) Yes, we will join Meta. 2) No, we did not obtain the authentication of 100m, this is false news. ” (Beyer politely refused to further comment on his new role with Techcrunch.)

Beyer’s expertise is in IT vision IA. This is aligned with what Meta continues: Entertainment Ai, rather than AI productivity, said Bosworth at this meeting. Meta already has a participation in the ground in this area with its Quest VR headsets and its Ray-Ban and Oakley AI glasses.

However, some of the people that the meta tries to spend time deserves large compensation packages in this tight market of AI talents. As Techcrunch was the first to report, Meta hired the Trapit of Openai BansalKnown for his revolutionary work on models of reasoning in AI. He had been working in Openai since 2022.

Admittedly, the co-founder and CEO of Scale, Alexandr Wang, obtains a good part of the money, probably more than 100 million dollars, as part of the Meta agreement to buy 49% of ownership of his business. As we previously pointed out, the meta of $ 14 billion pays is distributed to shareholders as a dividend in cash. Wang is almost certainly a major shareholder of the scale entitled these dividends.

However, while Meta does not distribute $ 100 million in Willy, it is still a lot to hire in AI.

An investor told Techcrunch that he had seen an AI researcher to obtain – and refuse – a job offer of $ 18 million from Meta. This person has taken a smaller, but always healthy offer, of a more buzzing startup: Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab.