Is Meta awarding $100 million signing bonuses to members of its newly formed AI superintelligence team? According to one of those geniuses who decided to make the move to Mark Zuckerberg’s camp, that’s not happening. “…that’s fake news,” says Lucan Beyer, ex-OpenAI researcher.
The alleged multi-million dollar offers have been a subject of widespread speculation in tech circles, particularly following reports of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment drive for top AI talent. However, Beyer took to X to directly address these claims.
“No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news,” Beyer wrote in his post, simultaneously announcing his move to Meta alongside his colleagues. This statement directly refutes earlier media narratives that detailed unprecedented compensation packages being offered by Meta to lure leading AI minds from competitors.
Beyer, along with Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, had previously worked together at Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI in December 2024 to establish the company’s Zurich office. Their collective move to Meta represents a notable acquisition for Zuckerberg’s superintelligence project, which aims to develop next-generation AI reasoning models that could rival or surpass those from industry leaders like OpenAI and Google.
The recruitment of these high-profile researchers underscores Meta’s intensified efforts to bolster its AI capabilities. This comes amidst a period where Meta is heavily investing in AI infrastructure, with plans to spend billions on infrastructure primarily dedicated to AI development.
While the exact financial terms of their new roles at Meta remain undisclosed, Beyer’s public denial aims to set the record straight on the scale of the widely reported signing bonuses.
Earlier, OpenAI’s Sam Altman had clarified that his top talent, which was offered positions at Meta, refused to make a transition. OpenAI is willing to push its AI development onto the next stage, willing to enter into the hardware segment by next year. Ex-Apple designer Jony Ive, who designed the iPhone, is now part of the OpenAI team to develop new assistant gadgets that will run a new ChatGPT-powered AI super assistant.