The tug of war for artificial intelligence developers between Meta and OpenAI is devolving into a knock-down, drag-out fight.

In an effort to revive his crumbling AI program, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently declared open season on OpenAI's staffers. The billionaire tech mogul is said to be hand-selecting AI researchers and developers to build out a "superintelligence" AI lab, offering up to $100 million in sign-on bonuses if they leave OpenAI for a seat at Meta's table. So far, OpenAI has lost at least eight researchers to Meta, as offers to top staff continue to grow.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — never one to sit back and take it from his fellow billionaires — responded to the threat by giving his employees a mandatory week off as the company's executives scramble to plug the holes on their leaky ship. Meanwhile, Altman is fuming.

In a fierce reply to Zuckerberg's poaching spree directed toward OpenAI's research department, Altman lashed out at his rival tech tycoon and made his lengthy case for why OpenAI employees should stand their ground.

"We have gone from some nerds in the corner to the most interesting people in the tech industry (at least)," Altman said in a Slack post viewed by Wired. "AI Twitter is toxic; Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful; I assume things will get even crazier in the future. After I got fired and came back I said that was not the craziest thing that would happen in OpenAl history; certainly neither is this."

Altman's comments refer to a brief ousting by OpenAI's board of directors in 2023, before being reinstated just a few days later.

"Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list; they have been trying to recruit people for a super long time, and I've lost track of how many people from here they've tried to get to be their Chief Scientist," Altman continued.

"I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries," the CEO said, adding that "missionaries will beat mercenaries."

To keep workers on the hook, Altman hinted that OpenAI is "assessing compensation for the entire research organization," according to Wired. "I believe there is much, much more upside to OpenAl stock than Meta stock."

Both companies swirl around an almost messianic faith in "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, the supposed point at which AI's cognitive abilities match up to or exceed a human's. So far, that remains a pipe dream — Microsoft's CEO recently expressed doubts that OpenAI can achieve AGI — but the promise still looms large in the fight to build the dominant AI monopoly.

"We actually care about building AGI in a good way," Altman evangelized. "Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be."

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