Throughout a company-wide all-hands assembly on Thursday, a few of Meta’s high executives have been requested concerning the “$100 million signing bonuses” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that they had been providing to poach his workers.
“Sam is simply being dishonest right here,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, mentioned on the assembly when requested about Altman’s remarks. “He’s suggesting that we’re doing this for each single particular person… Look, you guys, the market’s sizzling. It’s not that sizzling.”
The “$100 million bonus” headline has rightfully turn out to be a meme on social media since Altman mentioned the quantity on his brother’s podcast. “What Sam neglects to say is that he’s countering all these presents, making a small marketplace for a really, very small variety of people who find themselves for senior, senior management roles” within the new superintelligence AI crew Meta is constructing, Bosworth advised Meta workers at present. “That’s not the final factor that’s occurring within the AI area. And naturally, he’s not mentioning what the precise phrases of the supply are. It’s not [a] sign-on bonus. It’s all these various things.”
Bosworth then referenced latest tales a few handful of OpenAI researchers who’re becoming a member of Meta and mentioned there are “fairly a couple of extra within the pipeline that I can’t announce or share proper now.”
“Sam is thought to magnify, and on this case, I do know precisely why he’s doing it, which is as a result of we’re succeeding at getting expertise from OpenAI,” he mentioned. “He’s not very completely satisfied about that.”
On the Thursday assembly, there have been many workers current from the corporate’s engineering “bootcamp,” a multi-week onboarding program that assigns new hires to numerous groups. “For all the brand new bootcampers right here, you didn’t screw up,” Bosworth mentioned to laughs and claps from the viewers. “You made a fantastic choice. Comp is true the place it must be.”
Bosworth wasn’t the one Meta exec to say OpenAI through the inner assembly. CPO Chris Cox additionally acknowledged that, whereas Meta AI has one billion month-to-month customers, engagement “shouldn’t be practically as deep as the best way that persons are utilizing ChatGPT.” The standalone Meta AI app has solely 450,000 day by day customers, he advised workers, and “a whole lot of these of us” are utilizing it to handle their Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
“We aren’t going to go proper after ChatGPT and attempt to do a greater job with serving to you write your emails at work,” Cox mentioned. “We have to differentiate right here by not focusing obsessively on productiveness, which is what you see Anthropic and OpenAI and Google doing. We’re going to go deal with leisure, on reference to mates, on how individuals reside their lives, on the entire issues that we uniquely do properly, which is an enormous a part of the technique going ahead.”
Meta declined to touch upon the interior assembly.
Once I spoke with Jason Rugolo on Thursday, I needed to grasp why he’s suing probably the most influential firm in tech.
Rugolo’s AI gadget startup, Iyo, not too long ago gained a brief restraining order that bars OpenAI from utilizing the “io” model for Sam Altman’s new {hardware} division with Jony Ive. In response, Altman took to his X account to recommend that Rugolo filed his trademark lawsuit as a result of OpenAI refused to spend money on or purchase Iyo, which is gearing as much as launch its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this yr.
Rugolo acknowledges (and paperwork submitted to the courtroom affirm) that he pitched Altman on investing a number of instances. He additionally mentioned an acquisition with io crew members this yr. Nonetheless, he says his lawsuit isn’t a part of some revenge campaign, however relatively meant to get rid of any confusion between his forthcoming Iyo One headphones and Altman’s io.
Trademark lawsuits are a dime a dozen, however this one has damaged by means of for good cause. There’s intense curiosity in what Altman and Ive are constructing (the primary gadget apparently gained’t be an “in-ear” product or a “wearable”), and the case is a Rorschach take a look at for the way you are feeling about Altman, who’s undoubtedly polarizing.
“I had an enormous change in opinion on the man,“ Rugolo tells me of Altman. “Whereas I used to be assembly with them, I used to be underneath the spell of Sam Altman being a fantastic entrepreneur and a extremely attention-grabbing particular person. That broke fairly immediately after their public announcement [of io].”
“Am I getting screwed right here?” Rugolo remembers pondering. “Once I talked to him on the telephone and he made a Sopranos risk to sue me, I used to be similar to, ‘Alright, this man is a nasty dude.’” Now, he says that Altman is making an attempt to “manipulate the arguments within the public sphere” and “make me seem like a cash grubber or a sore loser, and I simply don’t suppose it’s gonna work.”
“This can be a baseless trademark dispute and never a case about stolen concepts or know-how,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden says in a press release shared with me. “Iyo demoed a product in Could 2025 that didn’t operate correctly or meet our requirements in hopes that we’d purchase Iyo. We handed. Jason Rugolo was additionally properly conscious of the io title and by no means raised issues earlier than our announcement.”
Due to the hundreds of thousands of {dollars} he not too long ago raised from his producer, Pegatron, and a billionaire whom he refuses to call, Rugolo says Iyo has sufficient runway to final it by means of the top of 2026. Once I ask if the gadget he teased in his viral TED talk final yr is certainly transport later this yr, he says he’s about to fly to China to “mainly be residing on the manufacturing unit.”
Whereas he’s able to undergo the authorized discovery course of and take his case to trial, he hopes that OpenAI will “put their weapons away” and “full like grown-ups on product.”
“I’ll meet them out there,” he tells me. “We are going to each attempt to launch stuff that’s actually cool and see if we are able to serve our clients. They’ll simply compete pretty and cease utilizing the title. They’ve among the finest designers on this planet, apparently. Consider a brand new title. You simply can’t use the one which I advised you about already, and that I’ve been utilizing since 2019.”
To this point, Runway is thought for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming trade.
This week, I used to be granted entry to a brand new interactive gaming expertise that Runway plans to make accessible to everybody as quickly as subsequent week, in accordance with CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The buyer-facing product is presently fairly barebones, with a chat interface that helps solely textual content and picture technology, however Valenzuela says that generated video video games are coming later this yr. He says that Runway can also be in talks with gaming corporations about each utilizing its know-how and accessing their datasets for coaching.
Based mostly on his latest conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming trade is in an analogous place to Hollywood when it was first launched to generative AI. There was appreciable resistance, however over time, AI has been progressively adopted in additional areas of the manufacturing course of. Valenzuela says Amazon’s latest present, Home of David, was made partly with Runway’s know-how, and that his firm is working with “just about each main studio” and “many of the Fortune 100 corporations.”
“If we might help a studio make a film 40 % sooner, then we’re in all probability gonna be capable of assist builders of video games make video games sooner,” he says. “They’re waking up, and so they’re shifting sooner than I’d say the studios have been shifting two years in the past.”
Naturally, I couldn’t let Valenzuela get off our Zoom name with out asking him about his recent acquisition talks with Zuckerberg: “I feel we’ve got extra attention-grabbing mental challenges being impartial, and remaining impartial for now.”
Nobody is aware of what AGI really means. That a lot is obvious from this wonderful deep dive from The Information into Microsoft’s cope with OpenAI. There was a whole lot of good reporting on the negotiations between the 2 corporations, however this piece is probably the most complete and detailed I’ve seen but. It states that Microsoft will not obtain unique entry to OpenAI’s IP if it achieves “adequate AGI,” which is contractually outlined as when OpenAI’s board determines that the AI “has the aptitude to generate” the utmost earnings its traders are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn’t have to truly generate these earnings.
Two under-the-radar offers: Though they haven’t garnered many headlines, OpenAI introduced an attention-grabbing partnership and a small acquisition this week. The primary is a deal with Applied Intuition to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in automobiles.” The second is the acquisition of the small crew at Crossing Minds, an AI startup that helped e-commerce corporations supply extra customized product suggestions. “Personally, becoming a member of OpenAI’s analysis crew to deal with brokers and knowledge retrieval is a novel honor,” Crossing Minds founder Alexandre Eobicque writes. “These are exactly the issues I’ve at all times been keen about: how techniques be taught, cause, and retrieve data at scale, in real-time.”
Some attention-grabbing profession strikes in tech:
- The three founders of OpenAI’s analysis workplace in Zurich, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, confirmed they’re becoming a member of Meta. (“No, we didn’t get 100M sign-on, that’s faux information,” writes Beyer.) Trapit Bansal, a former OpenAI researcher who “began the RL for reasoning effort with Ilya Sutskever” and co-created the o1 mannequin, is also joining Meta’s new lab.
- Elon Musk is cleansing home at Tesla. He reportedly fired Omead Afshar, his longtime fixer and head of producing. HR chief Jenna Ferrua is also out.
- Nate Mitchell has joined his fellow Oculus co-founder, Brendan Iribe, on the AI glasses startup Seasame, the place he’ll be chief product officer.
- Databricks hired Alan Davidson, the previous Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the NTIA, to be its head of presidency affairs.
- Nameless tech employees describe how AI has killed their jobs.
- Anthropic revealed research on how people are using Claude for emotional support. I’d like to see this type of analysis from OpenAI.
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap went on the live Hard Fork podcast. The start of this convo was fairly enjoyable — and a bit awkward — to observe from the viewers.
- The state of consumer AI from Menlo Ventures.
- “Inside Silicon Valley’s anti-college movement.”
- How Venice is bracing for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s marriage ceremony this weekend.
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