Throughout a company-wide all-hands assembly on Thursday, a few of Meta’s high executives have been requested in regards to 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, stated 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 scorching. It’s not that scorching.”
The “$100 million bonus” headline has rightfully turn into a meme on social media since Altman stated 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 instructed Meta workers immediately. “That’s not the final factor that’s taking place within the AI house. And naturally, he’s not mentioning what the precise phrases of the provide 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 stated there are “fairly just a few extra within the pipeline that I can’t announce or share proper now.”
“Sam is understood 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 stated. “He’s not very completely happy 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 stated to laughs and claps from the viewers. “You made an important resolution. Comp is correct the place it needs to 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 almost as deep as the way in which that individuals are utilizing ChatGPT.” The standalone Meta AI app has solely 450,000 day by day customers, he instructed workers, and “plenty of these of us” are utilizing it to handle their Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
“We’re not going to go proper after ChatGPT and try to do a greater job with serving to you write your emails at work,” Cox stated. “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 concentrate on leisure, on reference to buddies, on how folks dwell their lives, on the entire issues that we uniquely do nicely, which is a giant a part of the technique going ahead.”
Meta declined to touch upon the interior assembly.
Once I spoke with Jason Rugolo on Thursday, I wished to grasp why he’s suing probably the most influential firm in tech.
Rugolo’s AI system startup, Iyo, just lately gained a short lived 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 put money into or purchase Iyo, which is gearing as much as launch its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this 12 months.
Rugolo acknowledges (and paperwork submitted to the courtroom verify) that he pitched Altman on investing a number of instances. He additionally mentioned an acquisition with io crew members this 12 months. Nonetheless, he says his lawsuit isn’t a part of some revenge campaign, however quite meant to remove 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 way of for good cause. There’s intense curiosity in what Altman and Ive are constructing (the primary system apparently gained’t be an “in-ear” product or a “wearable”), and the case is a Rorschach check for a way you are feeling about Altman, who’s undoubtedly polarizing.
“I had a large 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 an important 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 recollects considering. “Once I talked to him on the telephone and he made a Sopranos menace to sue me, I used to be identical to, ‘Alright, this man is a nasty dude.’” Now, he says that Altman is attempting 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 expertise,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden says in an announcement shared with me. “Iyo demoed a product in Might 2025 that didn’t perform correctly or meet our requirements in hopes that we’d purchase Iyo. We handed. Jason Rugolo was additionally nicely conscious of the io title and by no means raised considerations earlier than our announcement.”
Because of the hundreds of thousands of {dollars} he just lately raised from his producer, Pegatron, and a billionaire whom he refuses to call, Rugolo says Iyo has sufficient runway to final it by way of the tip of 2026. Once I ask if the system he teased in his viral TED discuss final 12 months is certainly delivery later this 12 months, he says he’s about to fly to China to “mainly be dwelling on the manufacturing facility.”
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’ll each attempt to launch stuff that’s actually cool and see if we will serve our prospects. They’ll simply compete pretty and cease utilizing the title. They’ve a number of the greatest designers on the planet, apparently. Consider a brand new title. You simply can’t use the one which I instructed you about already, and that I’ve been utilizing since 2019.”
Thus far, Runway is understood 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 obtainable to everybody as quickly as subsequent week, in line with CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The patron-facing product is at the moment 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 12 months. He says that Runway can be in talks with gaming corporations about each utilizing its expertise and accessing their datasets for coaching.
Primarily based on his latest conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming trade is in the same 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 partially with Runway’s expertise, and that his firm is working with “just about each main studio” and “many of the Fortune 100 corporations.”
“If we will help a studio make a film 40 % quicker, then we’re in all probability gonna be capable of assist builders of video games make video games quicker,” he says. “They’re waking up, and so they’re shifting quicker 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 latest acquisition talks with Zuckerberg: “I believe we’ve got extra attention-grabbing mental challenges being unbiased, and remaining unbiased for now.”
Nobody is aware of what AGI truly means. That a lot is evident from this glorious deep dive from The Data into Microsoft’s cope with OpenAI. There was plenty 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 now 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 buyers are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn’t have to really 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 cope with Utilized Instinct to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in autos.” The second is the acquisition of the small crew at Crossing Minds, an AI startup that helped e-commerce corporations provide extra personalised product suggestions. “Personally, becoming a member of OpenAI’s analysis crew to concentrate on 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 captivated with: how programs study, 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 pretend 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, can be becoming a member of 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 can be 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 employed Alan Davidson, the previous Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the NTIA, to be its head of presidency affairs.
- Nameless tech staff describe how AI has killed their jobs.
- Anthropic revealed analysis on how individuals are utilizing Claude for emotional help. I’d like to see this sort of analysis from OpenAI.
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap went on the dwell Exhausting Fork podcast. The start of this convo was fairly enjoyable — and a bit awkward — to look at from the viewers.
- The state of shopper AI from Menlo Ventures.
- “Inside Silicon Valley’s anti-college motion.”
- How Venice is bracing for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding ceremony this weekend.
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