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Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Mark Cuban says hoarding talent and intellectual property will be king as the AI fight heats up
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said the AI arms race will be won by companies that hoard top talent and lock up valuable intellectual property — and that "IP is king" as the competition heats up. "What people are missing about AI, IMO [in my opinion], is no company is going to spend what will end up being more than a trillion dollars and accept not being dominant," Cuban posted on X on Sunday. Cuban believes that as the stakes grow, companies will stop at nothing to dominate, including hiring away key people and locking up the intellectual property they produce. "We are seeing them hire away talent and IP to advance their models," he wrote in a follow-up X post. "They will start paying to lock up IP they think their models need and the people who create it, just to keep it away from their competitors." Cuban's comments come as the AI talent wars reach fever pitch. Meta has reportedly offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million, part of a $15 billion deal to recruit Scale AI's CEO, Alexandr Wang, and other top researchers. On his brother's podcast, "Uncapped with Jack Altman," last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with nine-figure packages but had failed so far. Meta has since pushed back, with CTO Andrew Bosworth saying on CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" last month that Altman " neglected to mention that he's countering those offers." But not everyone is biting. "People here are so mission-oriented," said Anthropic cofounder Benjamin Mann, who said his team turned down Meta's "mega offers." Mann told "Lenny's Podcast" on Sunday that "at Anthropic, we affect the future of humanity," whereas "my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money." Still, Cuban believes those kinds of altruistic motivations will become harder to hold onto in a landscape defined by corporate hoarding. "We are seeing them hire away talent and IP to advance their models," he wrote in a follow-up X post. "They will start paying to lock up IP they think their models need and the people who create it just to keep it away from their competitors." Cuban sees this changing the culture of research itself. "The days of publish or perish are probably over. It's now publish, and its value perishes, because it got eaten up by every foundational model," he warned. His advice: "Encrypt and silo" valuable IP, and sell it to the highest bidder — or keep it behind a paywall. "IP is KING in an AI world," Cuban wrote. "The times they are a changing." As for the broader battle brewing in the industry, he added: "They will find a way to battle. I don't know how, other than to guess it will get ugly." Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas echoed Cuban's prediction in an episode of the "Decoder" podcast last Thursday, likening the industry's hiring frenzy to the high-stakes world of professional sports. "It's definitely going to feel like a transfer market now, like an NBA or something," he said. "There's going to be a few individual stars who are having so much leverage."
Business Insider
13-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
$300 billion, 500 million users, and no time to enjoy it: The sharks are circling OpenAI
At the end of March, the premier AI startup was collecting superlatives. It had just secured another $40 billion in funding, the largest private tech deal ever. That valued the company at $300 billion, which is the highest of any startup on the planet. Its flagship product, ChatGPT, was attracting some 500 million users a week, far more than its closest competitor. All seemed to be going great for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who, on top of it all, welcomed his first child a month earlier. Then the sharks started circling. In the last several weeks, OpenAI has faced attacks on multiple fronts, mostly from Big Tech behemoths like Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Smaller companies, too, smelled blood in the water. And rival chatbot makers, like xAI, have released buzzy new models, putting pressure on OpenAI to rush its own update. OpenAI engineers, some of whom told media outlets they've been working 80 hours a week or more, faced burnout. The company gave them all a week off to recover earlier this month. It's lonely at the top, as they say. Here's what the siege of OpenAI looks like. Meta poaches OpenAI staffers It seems a top AI engineer is the new superstar a June episode of the "Uncapped with Jack Altman" podcast, Jack's brother Sam said Mark Zuckerberg's Meta tried to poach OpenAI's staffers with "giant signing offers."Altman said Meta offered "$100 million signing bonuses," which he called "crazy.""I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped," Altman CTO Andrew Bosworth later told CNBC that Altman "neglected to mention that he's countering those offers."A week later, Meta had poached three top OpenAI researchers. One of them said on X that he was not offered a $100 million signing bonus, calling it "fake news."Retaining top talent is a necessity to compete in the AI race (Meta's Llama has had its own struggles), and some prominent investors, like Reid Hoffman, say paying huge signing bonuses makes sense. OpenAI itself has poached talent from xAI and Tesla in recent weeks, Wired reported, and Altman brushed off Meta's poaching on the sidelines of the Sun Valley conference earlier this month."We have, obviously, an incredibly talented team, and I think they really love what they are doing. Obviously, some people will go to different places," Altman told reporters. OpenAI took another hit this summer when its deal with Windsurf, the AI coding assistant startup, collapsed. OpenAI had agreed to purchase Windsurf for about $3 billion, Bloomberg June, however, tensions were rising between OpenAI and Microsoft. The tech giant is OpenAI's biggest investor, and it considers Windsurf a direct competitor of Microsoft current deal with OpenAI would give it access to Windsurf's intellectual property, which neither OpenAI nor Windsurf wants, a person with knowledge of the talks told Friday, OpenAI told BI that its deal with Windsurf had fallen through. Instead, Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and some other Windsurf employees would join Google DeepMind."We're excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding," Google's spokesperson told BI. "We're excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere." OpenAI delays release of new model Back in simpler times, at the end of March, as Altman was basking in the glow of the world's most valuable startup, he said the newly secured funding would allow OpenAI to "push the frontiers of AI research even further."He then announced that OpenAI was close to rolling out its first open-weight language model with advanced reasoning capabilities since GPT-2 in Friday evening, generally a good time to unveil bad news, Altman soberly told the world that OpenAI's new model would be delayed — again."We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas," Altman said on X. "We are not yet sure how long it will take us."He then apologized and assured everyone that "we are working super hard!"It marked the second delay in a month, pushing the timeline indefinitely beyond earlier promises of a June AI models offer a middle ground between open-source and proprietary systems by sharing only the pre-trained parameters of a neural network but not the actual source code. OpenAI products, unlike some of its competitors, like Meta's Llama and the Chinese AI chatbot, DeepSeek, and despite the company's name, are not open new model's delay comes days after Elon Musk's xAI launched a major update to its chatbot, Grok. While that update came with some significant trouble, forcing xAI to ultimately apologize, the chatbot boasts advancements in vision and voice that are resonating with users. Iyo sues IO
Business Insider
13-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
$300 billion, 500 million users, and no time to enjoy it: The sharks are circling OpenAI
It's been a rough few months at OpenAI. At the end of March, the premier AI startup was collecting superlatives. It had just secured another $40 billion in funding, the largest private tech deal ever. That valued the company at $300 billion, which is the highest of any startup on the planet. Its flagship product, ChatGPT, was attracting some 500 million users a week, far more than its closest competitor. All seemed to be going great for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who, on top of it all, welcomed his first child a month earlier. Then the sharks started circling. In the last several weeks, OpenAI has faced attacks on multiple fronts, mostly from Big Tech behemoths like Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Smaller companies, too, smelled blood in the water. And rival chatbot makers, like xAI, have released buzzy new models, putting pressure on OpenAI to rush its own update. OpenAI engineers, some of whom told media outlets they've been working 80 hours a week or more, faced burnout. The company gave them all a week off to recover earlier this month. It's lonely at the top, as they say. Here's what the siege of OpenAI looks like. Meta poaches OpenAI staffers It seems a top AI engineer is the new superstar athlete. During a June episode of the "Uncapped with Jack Altman" podcast, Jack's brother Sam said Mark Zuckerberg's Meta tried to poach OpenAI's staffers with "giant signing offers." Altman said Meta offered "$100 million signing bonuses," which he called "crazy." "I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped," Altman said. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later told CNBC that Altman "neglected to mention that he's countering those offers." A week later, Meta had poached three top OpenAI researchers. One of them said on X that he was not offered a $100 million signing bonus, calling it "fake news." Retaining top talent is a necessity to compete in the AI race (Meta's Llama has had its own struggles), and some prominent investors, like Reid Hoffman, say paying huge signing bonuses makes sense. OpenAI itself has poached talent from xAI and Tesla in recent weeks, Wired reported, and Altman brushed off Meta's poaching on the sidelines of the Sun Valley conference earlier this month. "We have, obviously, an incredibly talented team, and I think they really love what they are doing. Obviously, some people will go to different places," Altman told reporters. OpenAI's deal with Windsurf falls through OpenAI took another hit this summer when its deal with Windsurf, the AI coding assistant startup, collapsed. OpenAI had agreed to purchase Windsurf for about $3 billion, Bloomberg reported. By June, however, tensions were rising between OpenAI and Microsoft. The tech giant is OpenAI's biggest investor, and it considers Windsurf a direct competitor of Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft's current deal with OpenAI would give it access to Windsurf's intellectual property, which neither OpenAI nor Windsurf wants, a person with knowledge of the talks told BI. On Friday, OpenAI told BI that its deal with Windsurf had fallen through. Instead, Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and some other Windsurf employees would join Google DeepMind. "We're excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding," Google's spokesperson told BI. "We're excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere." Tensions with Microsoft The failed Windsurf deal was just another in a string of disagreements that have fueled tension between OpenAI and its largest investor. The deal between OpenAI and Microsoft is unsurprisingly complex. At the heart of the dispute is revenue splits and equity, of course, but also the very definition of artificial general intelligence. AGI is broadly considered AI that matches or surpasses human intelligence, but in terms of the deal between OpenAI and Microsoft, AGI is defined as $100 billion in profit. That's a lot of potential revenue. Under the deal, once OpenAI reaches that benchmark, Microsoft loses its share of OpenAI's revenue. Microsoft would understandably like to revise that line. As BI's Charles Rollet wrote earlier this month, the tension is made worse by the fact that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella isn't as sold on AGI's transformative power as all the people developing it at OpenAI. He also doesn't think it's coming anytime soon. He called AGI "nonsensical benchmark hacking" on a podcast earlier this year. OpenAI delays release of new model Back in simpler times, at the end of March, as Altman was basking in the glow of the world's most valuable startup, he said the newly secured funding would allow OpenAI to "push the frontiers of AI research even further." He then announced that OpenAI was close to rolling out its first open-weight language model with advanced reasoning capabilities since GPT-2 in 2019. On Friday evening, generally a good time to unveil bad news, Altman soberly told the world that OpenAI's new model would be delayed — again. "We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas," Altman said on X. "We are not yet sure how long it will take us." He then apologized and assured everyone that "we are working super hard!" It marked the second delay in a month, pushing the timeline indefinitely beyond earlier promises of a June launch. Open-weight AI models offer a middle ground between open-source and proprietary systems by sharing only the pre-trained parameters of a neural network but not the actual source code. OpenAI products, unlike some of its competitors, like Meta's Llama and the Chinese AI chatbot, DeepSeek, and despite the company's name, are not open source. The new model's delay comes days after Elon Musk's xAI launched a major update to its chatbot, Grok. While that update came with some significant trouble, forcing xAI to ultimately apologize, the chatbot boasts advancements in vision and voice that are resonating with users. Iyo sues IO In May, OpenAI announced a partnership with io, the design company founded by the famous former Apple design chief Jony Ive. Together, the two stars would develop future AI consumer devices. The deal was valued at about $6.5 billion. The announcement included a photo shoot of the two men that wouldn't have been out of place in a Vogue spread and a highly produced video in which Altman and Ive sit and chat in a wine bar drinking espresso. A month later, OpenAI removed all mentions of the collaboration from its platforms. Another company, iyO, a Google spinoff, had filed a trademark complaint. The names io and iyO were too similar, the suit says, and by all accounts, the new io collaboration would be developing products similar to ones iyO had planned. US District Judge Trina Thompson ruled that iyO's case is strong enough to move to a hearing this fall. She ordered Altman, Ive, and OpenAI not to use the io brand and take down mentions of the name. OpenAI denied the claims and said it was reviewing its legal options. OpenAI announced on July 9 that, despite the lawsuit, it had completed the deal to acquire io and posted a statement on its website. "We're thrilled to share that the io Products, Inc. team has officially merged with OpenAI. Jony Ive and LoveFrom remain independent and have assumed deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI," the statement said. Amazon is making a movie about Altman The coming film, "Artificial," produced by Amazon Studios, is all about Altman. And it's not a wholly flattering account, said Matt Beloni, a reporter at Puck who said he has seen a recent draft of the script. Belloni said the drama recounts the period in 2023 when Altman was fired and then rehired as CEO. It also follows OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who was also at the center of that drama and who left the company months later. At the heart of the tension over those few days was a disagreement between Altman and some top OpenAI execs over the company's commitment to its mission to develop AGI safely. A string of engineers working on alignment, an AI industry term for ensuring the tech is developed safely, left the company after Altman's reappointment (Microsoft, incidentally, played a key role in helping Altman survive). While many OpenAI employees rallied around Altman, others described him to the press at that time as "manipulative." Belloni reported that the film has parallels to "The Social Network," the 2010 biographical drama about Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. That film gained critical acclaim and likely damaged Zuckerberg's public persona. Zuckerberg called "The Social Network" inaccurate and " hurtful." According to Belloni, the version of the script he read depicts Altman as a "master schemer" and a liar. OpenAI won't go down without a fight Despite all the competition, OpenAI is still the leader in the space and is making its own moves that will likely worry rivals. It is planning to launch a new AI-powered web browser, for instance, that could compete with Google Chrome, the current industry leader. The browser will embed ChatGPT and feature an AI agent that can handle tasks like booking reservations and filling out forms. It also secured a $200 million contract to provide AI support to the US military. OpenAI will help develop capabilities to "address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains," the Pentagon said in June. OpenAI earlier partnered with Palmer Luckey's defense tech firm, Anduril. OpenAI is also forming more playful partnerships. Last month, Mattel announced it was working with OpenAI to bring AI to its iconic doll, Barbie. By using OpenAI's technology, Mattel will "bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety," the California-based toy manufacturer said in a press. Altman, for his part, is at least publicly optimistic. "I have never seen growth in any company, one that I've been involved with or not, like this," Altman said at a TED conference in Vancouver in April. "The growth of ChatGPT — it is really fun. I feel deeply honored. But it is crazy to live through."
Business Insider
27-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
An OpenAI researcher who jumped ship to Meta says he didn't get a $100 million signing bonus
A former OpenAI researcher who left the ChatGPT maker for Meta said he didn't receive a $100 million signing bonus when he joined the social media giant. Lucas Beyer joined OpenAI in November and helped set up its Zurich office with two of his colleagues, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. On Thursday, Beyer wrote in an X post that the three had moved to Meta. Meta's hiring of Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The trio had worked as research scientists at Google DeepMind before they joined OpenAI. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said in an episode of the "Uncapped with Jack Altman" podcast that aired last week that Meta had tried to poach his best employees. Altman said he found it "crazy" that Meta was dangling $100 million signing bonuses to recruit his staff. "I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," he added. "No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news," Beyer wrote on X on Thursday, but did not elaborate on the offer they had received. The three former OpenAI employees did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment. Meta has been ramping up its AI hiring efforts in a bid to dominate the field. Earlier this month, Meta said it had made a $15 billion investment in data-labeling firm Scale AI. The investment will also see ScaleAI's founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang leave his company to join Meta to work on their superintelligence efforts. "I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped," Altman said of Meta's investment in Scale AI on the "Uncapped with Jack Altman" podcast. Altman said he felt that the aggressive hiring strategy would not lead to a "great culture" at Meta. "There's many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don't think they are a company that's like great at innovation," he said. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, responded to Altman's comments in an interview with CNBC last week. Bosworth told the outlet that Altman and OpenAI had countered Meta's offers. Bosworth told CNBC that the scarcity of AI talent means a "relatively small pool of people" can command an "incredible market premium" for their skills. "The free market will do its thing. People see these numbers, and they are going to start to build this expertise. A couple years from now, it will probably be very different and there will be a lot of people with this talent pool," Bosworth said. "But today, it's a relatively small number and I think they have earned it," he added. Meta did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Business Insider
21-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Meta's CTO says OpenAI's Sam Altman countered Meta's massive AI signing bonuses
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta was trying to poach AI talent with $100M signing bonuses. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told CNBC that Altman didn't mention how OpenAI was countering offers. Bosworth said the market rate he's seeing for AI talent has been "unprecedented." OpenAI's Sam Altman recently called Meta's attempts to poach top AI talent from his company with $100 million signing bonuses "crazy." Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, says OpenAI has been countering those crazy offers. Bosworth said in an interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Friday that Altman "neglected to mention that he's countering those offers." The OpenAI CEO recently disclosed how Meta was offering massive signing bonuses to his employees during an interview on his brother's podcast, "Uncapped with Jack Altman." The executive said "none of our best people" had taken Meta's offers, but he didn't say whether OpenAI countered the signing bonuses to retain those top employees. OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. The Meta CTO said these large signing bonuses are a sign of the market setting a rate for top AI talent. "The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive," Bosworth said. "But that is a great credit to these individuals who, five or six years ago, put their head down and decided to spend their time on a then-unproven technology which they pioneered and have established themselves as a relatively small pool of people who can command incredible market premium for the talent they've raised." Meta, on June 12, announced that it had bought a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data company, for $14.8 billion as the social media company continues its artificial intelligence development. Business Insider's chief media and tech correspondent Peter Kafka noted that the move appears to be an expensive acquihire of Scale AI's CEO, Alexandr Wang, and some of the data company's top executives. Bosworth told CNBC that the large offers for AI talent will encourage others to build their expertise and, as a result, the numbers will look different in a couple of years. "But today, it's a relatively small number and I think they've earned it," he said.
