June 17 (Reuters) - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta

has offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to

recruit them, as the tech giant seeks to ramp up its artificial

intelligence strategy.

The alleged attempts by Meta to hire OpenAI staffers are the

latest signs of a frenzy to hire top engineers to develop AI

models, and they come at a time when the Facebook owner is

working on building its superintelligence unit to catch up with

competitors.

Competition for AI talent has reached a feverish pitch as

superstar researchers are being courted like professional

athletes on the belief that individual contributors can make or

break companies.

"They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people

on our team," Altman said on the Uncapped podcast that aired on

Tuesday, hosted by his brother. "You know, like $100 million

signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year."

"At least, so far, none of our best people have decided to

take them up on that," Altman said.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment

outside regular business hours, and Reuters could not verify the

information.

"I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest

competitor," Altman said.

His comments come just days after Meta invested $14.3

billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI, and hired its top

boss, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new superintelligence team.

Meta, once recognized as a leader in open-source AI models,

has suffered from staff departures and has postponed the

launches of new open-source AI models that could rival

competitors like Google, China's DeepSeek and OpenAI.