Lucas Beyer

, one of three

OpenAI researchers

who recently joined

Meta

's superintelligence team, has publicly dismissed reports that Mark Zuckerberg offered him a $100 million signing bonus, calling the claims "fake news." “No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news,” wrote Beyer in his post on X, announcing this move to Meta with his colleagues. Beyer’s clarification comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed on his brother's podcast that Meta had been making "giant offers" worth more than $100 million to lure away his top talent. Beyer, along with colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, announced their departure from OpenAI's Zurich office to join Meta's new AI unit this week.

When a social media user suggested Altman "clearly just threw out the 100m figure out there to make potential takers think that they were being lowballed," Beyer responded: "Yes, it was a brilliant move, gotta give him that."Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth echoed Beyer's sentiments during an internal company meeting Thursday, calling Altman "dishonest" and noting that the OpenAI chief was "countering all these offers" while creating inflated market expectations. Bosworth emphasized that such massive packages only apply to "a very, very small number of people" in senior leadership roles.The three researchers had previously worked together at Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI in December 2024 to establish the company's Zurich office. Their move to Meta represents a significant talent acquisition for Zuckerberg's ambitious superintelligence project.

Meta has also hired Trapit Bansal, a key OpenAI researcher who contributed to the company's first

AI reasoning model

, o1. The social media giant recently invested $14 billion in Scale AI and brought CEO Alexandr Wang into its superintelligence team as part of its aggressive recruitment drive.Zuckerberg's hiring spree follows underwhelming launches of Meta's latest AI models and delays in releasing upgraded versions. The company plans to spend up to $65 billion on capital expenditures this year, primarily for AI development.Despite the compensation denials, the talent war between tech giants continues intensifying as they race to develop cutting-edge AI technology. Meta's median employee compensation was $417,400 last year, with no executive receiving $100 million packages in recent years according to company filings.