Throughout a company-wide all-hands assembly on Thursday, a few of Meta’s prime executives had been requested in regards to the “$100 million signing bonuses” that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that they had been providing to poach his staff.
“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 individual… Look, you guys, the market’s scorching. It’s not that scorching.”
The “$100 million bonus” headline has rightfully turn out to be 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 group Meta is constructing, Bosworth informed Meta staff at the moment. “That’s not the final factor that’s occurring within the AI area. 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 couple of handful of OpenAI researchers who’re becoming a member of Meta and stated there are “fairly a number of 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 pleased about that.”
On the Thursday assembly, there have been many staff 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 excellent choice. Comp is true the place it needs to be.”
Bosworth wasn’t the one Meta exec to say OpenAI throughout the inside assembly. CPO Chris Cox additionally acknowledged that, whereas Meta AI has one billion month-to-month customers, engagement “isn’t practically as deep as the best way that persons are utilizing ChatGPT.” The standalone Meta AI app has solely 450,000 each day customers, he informed staff, and “numerous 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 associates, on how folks reside 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.
Jason Rugolo. Getty Photos / The Verge
Once I spoke with Jason Rugolo on Thursday, I needed to grasp why he’s suing probably the most influential firm in tech.
Rugolo’s AI gadget startup, Iyo, just lately received a brief 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 counsel that Rugolo filed his trademark lawsuit as a result of OpenAI refused to spend money on or purchase Iyo, which is gearing as much as launch its first AI-powered, in-ear headphones later this yr.
Rugolo acknowledges (and paperwork submitted to the courtroom verify) that he pitched Altman on investing a number of occasions. He additionally mentioned an acquisition with io group members this yr. Nonetheless, he says his lawsuit isn’t a part of some revenge campaign, however fairly supposed to eradicate 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 purpose. There’s intense curiosity in what Altman and Ive are constructing (the primary gadget apparently received’t be an “in-ear” product or a “wearable”), and the case is a Rorschach take a look at for the 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 excellent entrepreneur and a very attention-grabbing individual. That broke fairly immediately after their public announcement [of io].”
“Am I getting screwed right here?” Rugolo remembers considering. “Once I talked to him on the cellphone and he made a Sopranos risk to sue me, I used to be similar to, ‘Alright, this man is a nasty dude.’” Now, he says that Altman is making an attempt to “manipulate the arguments within the public sphere” and “make me appear 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 know-how,” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wooden says in an announcement shared with me. “Iyo demoed a product in Might 2025 that didn’t operate correctly or meet our requirements in hopes that we’d purchase Iyo. We handed. Jason Rugolo was additionally nicely conscious of the io identify and by no means raised issues earlier than our announcement.”
Due to 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 top of 2026. Once I ask if the gadget he teased in his viral TED speak final yr is certainly transport later this yr, he says he’s about to fly to China to “mainly be residing on the manufacturing unit.”
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 available in the market,” he tells me. “We’ll each attempt to launch stuff that’s actually cool and see if we are able to serve our prospects. They’ll simply compete pretty and cease utilizing the identify. They’ve a number of the finest designers on the planet, apparently. Consider a brand new identify. You simply can’t use the one which I informed you about already, and that I’ve been utilizing since 2019.”
Cristóbal Valenzuela. Getty Photos / The Verge
To date, Runway is understood for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming business.
This week, I used to be granted entry to a brand new interactive gaming expertise that Runway plans to make out there to everybody as quickly as subsequent week, in accordance 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 yr. He says that Runway can also be in talks with gaming firms about each utilizing its know-how and accessing their datasets for coaching.
Primarily based on his latest conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming business 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 know-how, and that his firm is working with “just about each main studio” and “a lot of the Fortune 100 firms.”
“If we may help a studio make a film 40 p.c sooner, then we’re in all probability gonna be capable to assist builders of video games make video games sooner,” he says. “They’re waking up, and so they’re transferring sooner than I’d say the studios had been transferring 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 feel we’ve got extra attention-grabbing mental challenges being unbiased, and remaining unbiased for now.”
Nobody is aware of what AGI really means. That a lot is evident from this wonderful deep dive from The Info into Microsoft’s take care of OpenAI. There was numerous good reporting on the negotiations between the 2 firms, however this piece is probably the most complete and detailed I’ve seen but. It states that Microsoft will not obtain unique entry to OpenAI’s IP if it achieves “ample AGI,” which is contractually outlined as when OpenAI’s board determines that the AI “has the potential to generate” the utmost income its buyers are entitled to. Amazingly, OpenAI doesn’t have to really generate these income.
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 take care of Utilized Instinct to “advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in autos.” The second is the acquisition of the small group at Crossing Minds, an AI startup that helped e-commerce firms provide extra personalised product suggestions. “Personally, becoming a member of OpenAI’s analysis group 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 techniques study, purpose, and retrieve information 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 faux 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 also 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 also 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 printed analysis on how persons are utilizing Claude for emotional assist. I’d like to see this sort of analysis from OpenAI.
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Brad Lightcap went on the reside Laborious 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 marriage ceremony this weekend.
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