OpenAI’s Altman: Meta unsuccessfully tried poaching its employees with $100 million offers

$100m

Mark Zuckerberg is on a hiring spree as he tries to build a “superintelligence” team at Meta to achieve AGI before anyone else. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Zuckerberg has been unsuccessful at poaching the company’s top engineers, even while offering them “$100 million signing bonuses” and compensation packages worth more than that.

Meta just agreed to pay $14 billion to acquire a 49% stake in training data startup Scale AI and hired away its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead the effort. Now they just need to figure out what AGI actually looks like, and when it might appear.

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Amazon cuts another 16,000 roles after laying off 14,000 workers in October

Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s cutting 16,000 roles across the company, having laid off 14,000 workers only three months ago.

“As I shared in October, we’ve been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti wrote in the press release. “While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.”

CEO Andy Jassy previously said that the October layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting. Galetti says layoffs, now totaling 30,000, won’t become a regular occurrence.

“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.”

Update on our organization

CEO Andy Jassy previously said that the October layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting. Galetti says layoffs, now totaling 30,000, won’t become a regular occurrence.

“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.”

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