Latest news with #ThinkingMachines
Time of India
16 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
‘Scared' of Mark Zuckerberg offers, OpenAI gives special one-time bonus to some employees
OpenAI has announced "special one-time" bonuses worth millions of dollars for about 1,000 employees – roughly one-third of its workforce – as the company battles to retain top AI talent, according to The Verge. The bonuses, announced just before the launch of GPT-5, target researchers and engineers in key departments including applied engineering, scaling, and safety. The highest payouts will reportedly reach the mid single-digit millions for OpenAI's most coveted researchers, who already earn millions annually. Engineers are expected to receive bonuses averaging hundreds of thousands of dollars. The payments will be distributed quarterly over two years, with recipients choosing between OpenAI stock, cash, or both. Rivals offer $100 million signing bonuses to lure OpenAI's top talent This marks the first time OpenAI has offered bonuses to such a large number of employees, highlighting the fierce competition for AI talent. The move comes after CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta has been offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages, to poach OpenAI staff. Speaking on a podcast, Altman claimed that "so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," but acknowledged Meta's aggressive strategy. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Use an AI Writing Tool That Actually Understands Your Voice Grammarly Install Now Undo Meta has led the charge in recruitment efforts, recently naming Shengjia Zhao , one of ChatGPT's creators, as chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. OpenAI's research officer Mark Chen has internally compared Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg 's poaching tactics to "a home invasion." The talent wars extend far beyond Meta's efforts. Elon Musk's xAI has also made aggressive offers to lure away OpenAI's top researchers, while former CTO Mira Murati recently recruited several technical leaders for her rival venture, Thinking Machines. Industry sources suggest that Zuckerberg has become so frustrated with Meta's AI progress that he's willing to invest billions in top talent, personally involving himself in recruitment efforts. Altman has criticised Meta's strategy of offering massive upfront guaranteed compensation, arguing it detracts from actual innovation work and fails to build a winning culture. "That basically never works," he said, suggesting competitors are "always going to where your competitor was" rather than fostering genuine innovation. Not all staff eligible for million-dollar payouts CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the competitive pressures, stating "we have been looking at comp for our technical teams given the movement in the market" and emphasised the company's intention to "keep increasing comp as we keep doing better and better as a company". The selective nature of these bonuses means two-thirds of OpenAI's workforce won't receive the additional compensation, raising questions about employee morale across different departments. The move could potentially deepen the very retention problems OpenAI was trying to solve. However, OpenAI is reportedly planning another retention strategy: allowing current and former employees to sell their company stock to investors, potentially at valuations approaching $500 billion
The Independent
5 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
What would it take for you to work for Mark Zuckerberg?
How many people would turn down a $1.5bn (£1.3bn) job offer from Mark Zuckerberg? Andrew Tulloch did. The Australian maths whizz and AI savant was reputedly (and we'll get to that…) offered a dizzying sum to leave Thinking Machines Lab, the AI start-up he co-founded in February with Mira Murati, a former leading light at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and rejoin his former employer, Meta. So the story goes, Zuckerberg had offered to buy their company, only to be rebuffed. The Wall Street Journal – which is a pretty reliable source on business matters – reports that Zuckerberg responded by launching a talent raid on the business: because if you can't buy a company outright, why not make the staff work for you instead? Tech is the ultimate people business, heavily reliant on the genius of its coders. Even if it costs more than a billion for the right hire, at least no one else in the industry can have him/her. Except it didn't work. Tulloch didn't bite, even for a package worth more than a billion. Nor did any of the other senior bods at Thinking Machines, which raised $2bn of funding in July on a valuation of $12bn. Now, it should be said that Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has sniffily called the report of Tulloch's job offer as 'inaccurate and ridiculous', while also dismissing the idea that Meta ever had an interest in buying Thinking Machines in the first place. The $1.5bn over six years, or whatever it was, would also have been heavily dependent on Meta's stock price going stratospheric. So it wasn't guaranteed – although a payday for Meta isn't an unreasonable expectation, given the love AI is getting from investors, and the way Zuckerberg's bet on all things AI is very obviously paying off in terms of the company's current financial performance. Silly-money salary packages are far from unusual in Silicon Valley, where firms compete for maths geniuses like Tulloch in the same way that NFL teams compete for quarterbacks. Tech talent, however, has a lot more choice than America's mega-star athletes, whose earnings are limited by salary caps and long-term contracts and the NFL's owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement, especially when they're starting out. In tech, that offer can mean adding another zero that you don't really need. And when you're still young and have already made more money than you can ever easily spend, with lots more to come, whatever you do, it's not the salary offer that counts – it's the business culture. These people can afford to think differently to regular wage slaves. Many are motivated by a sense of mission. They are also often highly loyal to the industry's leading figures. A decade ago, Zuckerberg told a Facebook town hall about his unique hiring mantra: "I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person,' he said. "It's a pretty good test." But, in the AI era, are those would-be employees, who can afford to be pickier than ever about who they sign up for, now applying the same methodology to him and his companies? Murati is interesting here. Already a rarity among the tech glitterati in that she's a woman, she also has a reputation for being collaborative and thoughtful, with less of the outsized – and sometimes, unpleasant – ego that is so prevalent in the Valley. So, once again: how many people would turn down $1.5bn? The answer is, potentially, quite a few in California, especially if the alternative is working for a small start-up with people you like and a culture you helped set up and can influence, as opposed to a corporate behemoth with a controversial history. Yes, Meta's culture is pretty favourable to engineers. If you've read Sarah Wynn-Williams's expose Careless People from her time there, you'll see that Zuck's favourite thing to do is to spend time with them, fixing problems, doing stuff, and geeking around. They're the company's gods. But it's interesting to note that Tulloch had already experienced that culture earlier in his already mightily impressive career. So yes, maybe money isn't everything. Of course, it's much easier to say that when you already have lots of it.
Economic Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Economic Times
Mark Zuckerberg was furious after Mira Murati refused his Rs 8,500 cr offer; Here's what he did next
Agencies Thinking Machine Labs rejected staggering $1 billion offer from Meta to join its Superintelligence Lab. The compensation packages ranged from $200 million to $1 billion over multiple years—to lure top AI researchers from Murati's startup. A few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab. She declined. Despite a $1 billion offer, she wouldn't part with it. Murati had just left OpenAI, where she had spent six years and risen to Chief Technology Officer. She wasn't about to hand over her new venture to Meta. Zuckerberg didn't take the rejection quietly. According to The Wall Street Journal, he followed up with what they described as a "full-scale raid". Over the following weeks, he and Meta's senior team approached more than a dozen of Murati's 50 employees. One person he focused on was Andrew Tulloch, a highly regarded AI researcher and co-founder of the startup. To tempt Tulloch, Meta reportedly offered him a compensation package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years, depending on bonuses and Meta's stock performance. A figure so large it raised eyebrows even in Silicon Valley. He still turned it spokesperson Andy Stone denied the report's accuracy, calling it 'inaccurate and ridiculous,' and insisted the company wasn't trying to acquire Thinking Machines. He claimed the compensation would have been entirely dependent on stock price whether or not the number is exact, it tells you something important: Meta is prepared to spend huge sums to pull the best minds into its orbit. And that effort isn't going unnoticed. Andrew Tulloch is not an easy man to poach. Born and educated in Australia, he studied mathematics at the University of Sydney, earning a University Medal and graduating top of his class. He went on to Cambridge for a Master's in statistics and completed his PhD at UC spent over a decade at Meta (then Facebook), where he helped develop PyTorch, one of the most widely used tools in machine learning today. His influence on Meta's AI infrastructure was massive. But loyalty, it turns out, doesn't only go one Greg Brockman tried to recruit Tulloch back in 2016. At the time, Brockman told Elon Musk via email that Tulloch was earning $800,000 at Facebook and was hesitant to take a steep pay cut to join OpenAI's leaner operation. Tulloch didn't join then. He waited seven years, and finally moved to OpenAI in 2023, by which time ChatGPT had already exploded onto the global stage. There, he helped with GPT-4's pretraining and reasoning models. In 2025, he co-founded Thinking Machines with Murati. Zuckerberg's team wasn't the only one reaching out. Alexandr Wang, now leading Meta's new superintelligence lab, also tried to woo Tulloch back. Neither a pattern here. Meta has reached out to more than 100 OpenAI employees. At least 10 have joined. But not from the circles that matter most. Most of the top researchers, especially those closest to the mission of building artificial general intelligence, have stayed Because for many of them, this isn't just a job. It's a OpenAI and its offshoots, like Dario Amodei's Anthropic and now Murati's Thinking Machines, the culture is unusually tight-knit. Many early employees shared a belief in 'effective altruism,' a social movement focused on doing measurable good, and a shared concern that AI, if not handled carefully, could cause catastrophic lived together in shared houses in San Francisco. They debated ethics and long-term risks. They weren't there for advertising revenue or status. They were there to steer the hard to buy, no matter how big your offer Murati's Thinking Machines is still operating in stealth. Even its investors, who've poured $2 billion into the company, don't fully know what's being we do know: the goal is to make 'AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable.' Murati herself said the team is building 'multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world.' A product announcement is expected soon. Murati has recreated the low-ego, high-trust culture she once nurtured at OpenAI. The titles are flat. Even senior engineers are listed as 'Member of Technical Staff,' a nod to the egalitarian approach inspired by Bell Labs. This kind of atmosphere breeds strong loyalty. When she founded the company in February, more than 20 OpenAI colleagues joined her. One was John Schulman, a key figure behind ChatGPT. He had briefly left for Anthropic, only to return to work with has been playing catch-up. The company recently launched a superintelligence team led by Shengjia Zhao, an ex-OpenAI researcher. It's hired at least two employees from Anthropic, Joel Pobar and Anton Bakhtin, both of whom had previously worked at there are limits to how many people Meta can lure seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, are still at the company. Most of them met over a decade ago through the effective altruism community. They're still there. Still committed. Still cautious about where their work ends up. Even Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI's original co-founders, has built a startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), in a way that makes it nearly impossible to poach from. He's deliberately hiring unknowns, mentoring them quietly, and asking employees to leave the company off their LinkedIn profiles. Meta tried to buy SSI earlier this year. Sutskever said moment in tech isn't just about building better AI models. It's about who builds them, why, and for whom. You can't just throw money at that and expect it to can offer more zeroes than almost anyone. But what he's finding is that belief, loyalty and culture often outweigh cash. You can't just raid your way to the engineers may jump for a better offer. Others don't. Tulloch didn't. Murati didn't. Their teams stayed. That says more than any dollar figure ever could.
Time of India
31-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Can you believe this? Zuckerberg offered $1 billion pay package to an AI researcher - what happened next was shocking
In a stunning revelation that reflects the escalating talent war in the artificial intelligence industry, Mira Murati, founder of Thinking Machines Lab , has disclosed that her entire 50-member team unanimously rejected lucrative job offers from Meta, including one jaw-dropping package worth $1 billion. The development throws light on the increasing lengths to which tech behemoths are willing to go in their pursuit of top AI minds. Meta's aggressive recruitment campaign As per a report by Wired, Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta has been on a relentless hunt to hire AI experts, targeting researchers at Murati's San Francisco-based AI start-up, Thinking Machines. The social media conglomerate, which recently consolidated its AI research efforts under Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), reportedly made offers ranging from $200 million to $1 billion, with substantial portions tied to stock options and multi-year vesting schedules, as per a report by The Telegraph. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category others Data Science Data Analytics Technology Design Thinking Digital Marketing healthcare Cybersecurity MBA Degree Management Healthcare PGDM Project Management Finance Others Product Management Operations Management Public Policy Artificial Intelligence Data Science CXO MCA Leadership Skills you'll gain: Duration: 16 Weeks Indian School of Business CERT - ISB Cybersecurity for Leaders Program India Starts on undefined Get Details Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI and now among the most influential figures in the AI sector, confirmed that despite the extraordinary compensation, not a single member of her company accepted Meta's overtures. 'So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer,' Murati told Wired, as mentioned in a report by The Telegraph. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Neuropathy is not from Low vitamin B. Meet the Real Enemy of Neuropathy (Stop Doing This) Health Insight Journal Learn More Undo Disputed figures and Meta's official stand While Murati's disclosure made headlines, Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back against the figures reported. In a statement to The Telegraph, Stone acknowledged that Meta had extended offers to a few individuals at Thinking Machines, including one 'sizeable' proposal. However, he maintained that the broader monetary claims were 'off' and questioned the motives behind the leak, stating, 'This all begs the question, who is spinning this narrative and why?' Despite the contention, industry observers note that Meta's ongoing hiring spree reflects its commitment to regaining AI dominance after internal frustration over slow progress. The company has made several high-profile poaching attempts in recent months, including personalized WhatsApp messages from Zuckerberg himself to leading researchers. Live Events Thinking Machines: No product, yet $12 billion valuation The allure of Thinking Machines Lab is evident in its rising valuation. Despite having no consumer-facing product yet, the startup recently secured $2 billion in new funding, pushing its valuation to $12 billion. Murati revealed that the company plans to unveil its first product within the next few months, with open-source components designed to foster collaboration within the AI community. This rapid valuation growth, coupled with an elite team, makes Thinking Machines a hotbed of talent, one that Meta and other rivals are eager to tap. However, Murati's announcement that none of her researchers were tempted by Meta's riches further cements the startup's internal cohesion and mission-oriented culture. Meta's high-stakes AI ambitions Meta's recent establishment of its Superintelligence Labs signals its intensified focus on long-term AI innovation. With Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, now leading the lab, Zuckerberg has realigned Meta's AI strategy to accelerate development of advanced AI tools. This shift comes amid fierce competition from the likes of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Apple. Notably, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also confirmed that his employees had received nine-figure offers from Meta in recent weeks. The unprecedented pay packages reflect the strategic importance of AI leadership for future growth and geopolitical influence, as per the report by The Telegraph. An ethical stance or strategic branding? While the news has captivated the tech world, questions persist about whether Murati's move is entirely altruistic or part of a broader brand positioning strategy. With the AI industry under scrutiny for its ethical practices and monopolistic ambitions, Murati's public refusal of excessive compensation could bolster her company's reputation as values-driven and independent. Still, it signals a turning point in the AI labor market, where not every researcher can be bought with billions. For now, Thinking Machines Lab remains immune to Meta's vast war chest, though the question remains: for how long? As the AI arms race continues to escalate, the saga between Meta and Thinking Machines may just be the opening chapter. With more funding rounds, product launches, and talent bids expected in the months ahead, the spotlight will remain firmly on leaders like Mira Murati and Mark Zuckerberg. FAQs What is Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, and why is it in the spotlight? Thinking Machines Lab is a San Francisco-based AI startup founded by Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI. It recently made headlines after Murati revealed that her entire 50-member team rejected job offers from Meta, including a staggering $1 billion offer, highlighting the growing battle for AI talent. Did Meta really offer $1 billion to a Thinking Machines Lab researcher? According to Murati, one of her team members was offered a $1 billion compensation package by Meta. However, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone disputed the claim, saying the reported figures were exaggerated and questioned the motives behind the leak.
Yahoo
28-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mira Murati's record-breaking $2 billion seed round made the impossible possible for female founders
In today's edition: an EU-Trump trade deal, the Lionnesses' victory, and the improbability and impact of Mira Murati's $2 billion. – Mission impossible. Earlier this month, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab confirmed long-rumored news: the AI company had closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation. It was the largest seed round ever, in the history of venture capital and startups. It was hardly underreported. And yet, there's an aspect to this news that hasn't seemed to have been fully appreciated—just how unlikely, and meaningful, this is for female founders. Murati is, undoubtedly, in a league of her own as a founder. The Albania-born former CTO of OpenAI, she helped create ChatGPT and start the generative AI revolution. She left OpenAI earlier this year to build her own company. She brought top talent with her; the question everyone wants to know the answer to is what, exactly, she is building. Not that many details are known about what Thinking Machines is doing. But a source familiar with what Murati is building tells me that it's creating powerful AI systems capable of tackling the world's toughest problems—climate change, disease eradication, and more. The company is eager to bring along the world's smartest people in other fields—like science—rather than only those who work in the AI industry itself, all before AI systems become too powerful for that to matter. And its more open approach is expected to benefit businesses, policymakers, and others. But Thinking Machines is entering the game late, hence the $2 billion: it needs compute and talent to compete with the AI leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google that have a years-long head start. In an environment where startups with at least woman on the founding team took in $38 billion in funding last year—and those founded solely by women earned 2.1% of VC dollars, for a total sum of $3.7 billion, across about 800 deals—the $2 billion number is extraordinary. A report released by Female Founders Fund and Inc. last week showed what women are doing with the paltry share of venture funding they are getting; last year women were responsible for 24% of exits. They put capital to work more efficiently, earning 78 cents of revenue for every dollar raised, compared to 31 cents at male-founded startups. So imagine what will be possible with $2 billion—and a generational founder at the helm. Known investors in the company include Accel, AMD, Cisco, Jane Street, Nvidia, and ServiceNow. They're surely expecting their investment to pay off (see: $12 billion valuation). But more important is how Murati and her capital will impact humanity. The true entry of Thinking Machines into the AI race helps diversify the perspectives that will shape the future of our world. And Murati's achievement lets other women know, in frontier tech and beyond—what seems impossible, can be possible. Emma The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune's daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
