$200 Million salary, Poaching wars: Inside Silicon Valley's AI talent arms race

The race to dominate artificial intelligence is fuelling a hiring frenzy unlike anything Silicon Valley has seen before. In a stunning move that’s turning heads across the tech world, Meta has reportedly offered over $200 million in total compensation to Ruoming Pang, a former top executive from Apple who led the company’s AI models team.

That figure not only exceeds the annual pay of most Fortune 500 CEOs, it’s also emblematic of how far Big Tech is willing to go in order to secure the minds behind the next wave of generative AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI).

But Pang is not alone. Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs has been handing out nine-figure offers, sometimes approaching $300 million, to recruit AI engineers and researchers from Apple, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses to poach talent from his organisation. While some declined, others accepted, igniting what some in the industry are calling an “AI draft season”.

OpenAI Strikes Back, Hires Top Talent from Tesla, xAI and Meta

In a counter move, OpenAI has made some high-profile hires of its own. Four senior engineers have recently joined its scaling team, which manages OpenAI’s backend infrastructure and is central to the company’s moonshot Stargate project.

Among the new hires is David Lau, the former VP of software engineering at Tesla. He’s joined by Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton, both previously at Elon Musk’s xAI, where they helped build Colossus, a supercomputer powered by more than 200,000 GPUs. Before xAI, the pair also worked at Robinhood. Rounding out the list is Angela Fan, a former researcher at Meta AI.

Speaking to Wired, Ruddarraju described OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions as “where research meets reality” and said the Stargate programme was “a perfect match” for the challenges he thrives on. Lau added that building safe, well-aligned AGI is “the most rewarding mission” he could imagine at this stage in his career.

An OpenAI spokesperson said the new hires are part of a broader push to unite “world-class infrastructure, research, and product teams” to accelerate its mission.

Nine-Figure Salaries, Poaching Wars, and the Road to AGI

The aggressive talent raids and astronomical pay packages have drawn both admiration and concern. While LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman called them “economically rational” for individuals who might unlock trillion-dollar breakthroughs, others are sounding alarms.

In an interview on the BG2 podcast, Michael Dell warned that the widening compensation gap between new and existing employees could create cultural rifts within companies. Meta has reportedly designed elaborate vesting schedules and internal communication plans to soften the impact, but tensions are reportedly rising across tech campuses.

With the brightest AI minds now commanding the kind of wealth typically reserved for hedge fund managers and startup founders, the question is no longer if there will be a reckoning, but when. And as companies like Meta and OpenAI continue to poach from each other, the next breakthrough in AI might depend less on algorithms and more on who can afford to hire and keep the people who build them.