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Microsoft may be looking to one-up Meta by poaching AI talent that the social media giant itself lured from other companies.
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The Windows maker has put together a list of the top engineers and AI researchers at Meta, according to a report by Business Insider. Microsoft is also aiming to match Meta’s compensation for top AI talent as part of its new process to make its offers more competitive.
This process includes directing recruiters to designate suitable candidates as ‘critical AI talent’ so that the company’s executives can more quickly respond with a top offer to those candidates, as per the report.
These offers amount to millions of dollars, including multimillion-dollar on-hire bonuses. Engineers and researchers already working at Microsoft have maximum compensation packages of $408,000 as well as $1.9 million in on-hire stock awards, $1.5 million in annual stock awards, and annual cash bonuses as high as 90 per cent, as per the company’s purported internal pay guidelines.
Microsoft’s push to recruit top AI talent signals that it is willing to reshuffle its workforce to stay ahead in the AI race, even if it means stretching beyond its usual pay limits to outpace rivals. The move also comes against the backdrop of Microsoft’s plans to axe thousands of jobs in what has shaped up to be its largest round of job cuts in a year.
There are two AI teams at Microsoft, namely: Microsoft AI led by former Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman and CoreAI, another team led by former Meta engineering head Jay Parikh.
Microsoft’s internal spreadsheets reportedly show that it appears to be targeting employees working at Meta’s Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Meta AI Research divisions.
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Meta itself has been making nine-figure offers to lure top AI talent from other companies such as OpenAI. Shengjia Zhao, one of the creators of ChatGPT, was recently named as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Mark Chen, OpenAI’s research officer, has previously likened Meta’s aggressive poaching spree to a home invasion.
Meanwhile, OpenAI recently announced a ‘special one-time award’ to its AI researchers and engineers across several departments, including applied engineering, scaling, and safety. The bonuses were announced a day before the ChatGPT maker unveiled GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large language model (LLM).
More than 1,000 OpenAI employees are eligible for the bonus, according to a report by The Verge. The ChatGPT-maker is currently valued at $300 billion.
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