and OpenAI are rising. The Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant has already poached OpenAI's top researchers with lucrative offers and is reportedly still on the lookout for more talent.

According to a report by Wired, OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, has addressed Meta’s aggressive recruitment tactics in a memo sent to employees on Saturday.

“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote in his memo.

“Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by,” he added.

Zuckerberg has been hiring aggressively to build an AI team and had offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million to some OpenAI employees, Sam Altman said in his brother’s podcast.

The Facebook cofounder is building a new 50 people AI ‘superintelligence’ team after Meta’s latest Llama models failed to gain traction compared to rivals.

“Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages,” Chen wrote in a message on Slack, as per Weird report.

Chen also said he has been working alongside Sam Altman and other company leaders “to talk to those with offers”.

“We’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognise and reward top talent,” he added.

The report states that OpenAI staff have been grappling with an intense workload as many employees work 80 hours per week. The AI startup is largely shutting down next week to give employees time to recharge, but it knows Meta might use this time to poach its top talent.

“Meta knows we’re taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation,” another leader at the company wrote, according to Chen’s memo.