Bloomberg reports that Meta Platforms has made record-breaking compensation offers to attract AI experts to its “superintelligence” team, including a package exceeding $200m for ex-Apple engineer Ruoming Pang. These multi-year offers combine base salary, cash bonuses, and heavily performance-tied Meta stock. Apple reportedly did not counter due to internal pay norms. Meta’s AI recruitment push also includes former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, now Meta’s Chief AI Officer via a $14.3bn equity deal. Offers rival CEO pay at major banks and are structured to reward long-term loyalty and Meta stock performance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some employees received $100m signing bonuses but stayed due to OpenAI’s innovation culture. Nonetheless, Meta has hired over 10 OpenAI researchers along with talent from Anthropic and Google. The AI talent war continues, with Altman and Zuckerberg expected to cross paths at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley.
