After the OpenAI board fired CEO Sam Altman, more than 500 employees also threatened to resign. The turmoil at OpenAI over the weekend provided an opportunity to competitors like Google to reportedly poach some talent from the Microsoft-backed company. One of them was Salesforce whose CEO announced that the software giant will hire OpenAI researchers.
“Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a post on X.
“Send me your cv directly to ceo@salesforce.com. Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted AI Enterprise Revolution,” he added.
What OpenAI employees said
While Benioff’s offer was lucrative enough for the industry that has seen thousands of job cuts by tech giants, a lot of OpenAI employees rejected the proposal. Researcher Tony Wu, who leads human data at OpenAI, humbly rejected the proposal.
“This is a super generous offer! I’m sure my team really appreciates it,” he said, adding that the employees are with former CEO Sam Altman, CTO Mira Murati who has been among the employees demanding Altman’s reinstatement and co-founder Greg Brockman, who quit soon after Altman was ousted.
Boris Power, head of Applied Research at OpenAI, said that it is not about compensation.
“Lol, like it was ever about compensation. We got >95% in less than 24 hours, and the compensation never crossed my mind! Can you give us 700 of our amazing colleagues, then we may budge,” he added.
— BorisMPower (@BorisMPower)
Steven Heidel, a researcher at OpenAI who is tasked with fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), thanked Benioff and said that he’ll be sticking with Altman and Brockman.
OpenAI rivals like Cohere and Adept also made efforts to recruit employees from the ChatGPT maker, and Google DeepMind received an uptick in new resumes from workers at the company, The Information reported citing people with direct knowledge.
