Lucas Beyer posted on X Thursday that he, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai would depart OpenAI to join the $1.8 trillion company led by Mark Zuckerberg. Beyer said it was “fake news” that Zuckerberg was paying him that level of compensation. However, that news came from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself, who called the offers “crazy” this month. 

“They started making these like, giant offers, to a lot of people on our team—$100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year,” Altman told his brother Jack Altman in an episode of the podcast Uncapped. “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”

hey all, couple quick notes:
1) yes, we will be joining Meta.
2) no, we did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news.

Excited about what’s ahead though, will share more in due time!

cc @__kolesnikov__ and @XiaohuaZhai.— Lucas Beyer (bl16) (@giffmana) June 26, 2025

Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai have been members of the technical staff at OpenAI since December 2024, which they joined after being poached from rival Google DeepMind. They depart for Meta at a time when competition for talent among AI firms is reaching a frenzied pitch, with Zuckerberg reportedly on a recruitment spree to counter the narrative that it is lagging behind in AI development. Reports claim the company is hiring a 50-person “Superintelligence” team to ramp up its AI efforts. Meta has also purchased a $14 billion stake in Scale AI, to bring CEO Alexandr Wang into the fold. 

Zuckerberg famously earns only $1 as CEO at Meta, although the company provides him a $14 million allowance for costs related to security for Zuckerberg and his family. He holds about 13% of the tech behemoth’s stock and his fortune is valued at $250 billion by Forbes. 

Among the top-paid executives at Meta, chief operating officer Javier Olivan was paid the most last year, with compensation valued at $25.5 million. No other top executive at Meta was paid $100 million in any of the past three years, according to the company’s financial filings. 

The median of the total annual compensation of all Meta employees other than Zuckerberg was $417,400 last year. 

On X, a commenter speculated that Altman “clearly just threw out the 100m figure out there to make potential takers think that they were being lowballed.”

“Yes, it was a brilliant move, gotta give him that,” posted Beyer in response.

OpenAI and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

For the second time this week, a US federal judge has issued an opinion on whether or not using copyrighted materials without permission to train AI amounts to “fair use” – and the most recent ruling contradicts the previous one.

In an order on Monday (June 23), Judge William Alsup handed a partial victory to AI company Anthropic in its defense against a lawsuit by three authors, declaring that training AI on copyrighted materials does indeed count as fair use.

Two days later, another judge in the same court – the US District Court for the Northern District of California – declared the exact opposite.

“This case presents the question whether such conduct is illegal,” Judge Vince Chhabria wrote. “Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes.”

This latest ruling is in a class-action case brought in 2023 against Meta – owner of Facebook and Instagram and developer of the Llama large language model – by 13 writers, including comedian Sarah Silverman, who wrote the book The Bedwetter. Other authors involved in the suit include Richard Kadrey, Junot Diaz, and Laura Lippman.

They argued that Llama had been trained on their works without permission, and would even reproduce parts of those works when prompted.

Despite his conclusion that training AI on copyrighted works without permission isn’t fair use in most cases, Judge Chhabria ruled in Meta’s favor – but only because, in his view, the authors’ lawyers had argued the case badly.

The authors “contend that Llama is capable of reproducing small snippets of text from their books. And they contend that Meta, by using their works for training without permission, has diminished the authors’ ability to license their works for the purpose of training large language models,” the judge noted. He called both arguments “clear losers.”

“Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data,” the judge wrote in his order, which can be read in full here.

The judge granted Meta’s request for a partial summary judgment in the case.

But what may be of greatest interest to rightsholders is that Judge Chhabria offered what he says would be a winning argument: That allowing tech companies to train AI on copyrighted works would severely harm the market for human-created works.

“The doctrine of ‘fair use,’ which provides a defense to certain claims of copyright infringement, typically doesn’t apply to copying that will significantly diminish the ability of copyright holders to make money from their works (thus significantly diminishing the incentive to create in the future),” Judge Chhabria wrote.

“What copyright law cares about, above all else, is preserving the incentive for human beings to create artistic and scientific works… By training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works, and thus dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way.”

“By training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works…”

US District Judge Vince Chhabria

Copyright owners likely won’t be happy to hear the judge’s assertion that they don’t have a right to a market for licensing works to AI companies, but they’re likely to rejoice over much of the rest of the judge’s argument – including a remarkable passage where he directly criticizes the earlier ruling by Judge Alsup, who sits on the same court.

“Judge Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on,” Judge Chhabria wrote.

“Such harm would be no different, he reasoned, than the harm caused by using the works for ‘training schoolchildren to write well,’ which could ‘result in an explosion of competing works’…

“But when it comes to market effects, using books to teach children to write is not remotely like using books to create a product that a single individual could employ to generate countless competing works with a miniscule fraction of the time and creativity it would otherwise take. This inapt analogy is not a basis for blowing off the most important factor in the fair use analysis.”

“If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

US District Judge Vince Chhabria

The judge also demolished an argument often made by AI companies: That forcing them to license all the materials they use for training would slow down or even stop development of the technology.

“The suggestion that adverse copyright rulings would stop this technology in its tracks is ridiculous,” Judge Chhabria wrote.

“These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions, of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

Using pirated works not OK, judges agree

The disagreement between the two judges notwithstanding, there is one thing they both agreed on: Using pirated copies of works to train AI is not acceptable.

In the case against Anthropic, Judge Alsup ordered the AI company to answer for its use of materials taken from online libraries known to offer pirated books. That part of the case will be heard in December, and Anthropic could find itself on the hook for up to $150,000 per infringed work.

Similarly, Judge Chhabria allowed one key part of the authors’ case to go forward: The part dealing with Meta’s alleged use of the torrent file-sharing network to download illegal copies of books, and its stripping out of rights management information from the books it obtained, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

All in all, the two rulings present an unusual instance of one court offering two very different opinions on the same question – a matter likely to be resolved, sooner or later, by an appeals court.Music Business Worldwide

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Sir Keir Starmer gave rebel Labour MPs expensive concessions on welfare cuts on Thursday as the prime minister sought to defuse the biggest political crisis of his first year in office.

Leading rebels said they had been promised “significant changes” to welfare legislation that some MPs believed would be enough to avert a defeat for the government in the House of Commons next week.

Starmer offered to limit cuts to the main disability benefit to new claimants at a cost of £1.5bn a year, bring forward a £1bn package of employment support payments to this year, and consult on the reforms, according to MPs.

The compromise would reduce the £5bn in annual savings the government had hoped to make from the bill.

“These are significant changes, they’ve listened and they’ve heard and they’ve made the changes,” the MP said. “I think colleagues will be won over.”

But another influential rebel said they were not yet ready to capitulate. “MPs will be mad to accept concessions on trust until they’ve seen them in black and white, I still want them to pull the bill, because some of us simply don’t trust them,” they said.

Starmer’s offer on Thursday followed a week in which Labour MPs have been threatened with deselection or having funding stripped from their constituencies if they derail the welfare reforms.

With Starmer trying to fend off an uprising by more than 120 Labour MPs, one rebel said the government’s “brutal” approach had threatened to unleash a “civil war”.

MPs said earlier on Thursday that Number 10 appeared to be targeting the “leaders” of the revolt in the talks, but backbenchers insisted that they would need to see real change. With more names joining the rebellion, the number of MPs prepared to sign a “reasoned amendment” against the welfare bill had increased to 126.

There were frantic calls on Thursday evening between Labour MPs seeking to digest the details of the potential compromise and work out whether they would pull their names from the rebel amendment, which was designed to scupper the legislation at its second reading.

The prospect of a defeat has been highly embarrassing for a government that has a huge working majority of 165 seats and would threaten to undermine Starmer’s standing just before the anniversary of his general election win next week.

The prime minister has also been warned by City analysts that a retreat would make it even more likely that his struggling Labour administration will have to put up taxes in the autumn Budget.

Ministers are running out of time to hammer out a compromise, with the bill’s second reading in the Commons due on Tuesday. The legislation would then be rushed through parliament, with its third reading only a week later — leaving MPs with little time for further debate.

“All colleagues want to get this right, and so do I,” Starmer told MPs on Thursday. “We want to see reform implemented . . . that conversation will continue in the coming days, so we can begin making changes together on Tuesday.”

Health secretary Wes Streeting told the FT: “Keir and [deputy prime minister] Angela Rayner have been working intensively with [work and pensions secretary] Liz Kendall and MPs to try and get everyone back on the same page.”

The rebels, who include 10 chairs of select committees, stunned Downing Street when they announced on Monday night that they would put forward a “reasoned amendment” to torpedo the welfare bill.

As well as the opposition from dozens of rank-and-file MPs, there were also a handful of junior ministers and parliamentary aides understood to be on the brink of resignation if the government ploughed ahead.

Toby Perkins, a moderate MP who joined the rebellion on Wednesday night, said: “I fear that the changes . . . will hit too many disabled people, many of whom really need the payment in order to be able to access work or to cope with their disability.”

The legislation is designed to address the fact that 2.8mn people in the UK have a long-term health condition that prevents them from working, while the government says one-in-10 working-age adults claim a health-related benefit.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, has vowed aggressive cuts to welfare if elected, saying on Thursday that the number of people now registered as disabled in the country was “extraordinary”. However, the Tories have said they will only back the bill if Labour accepts several amendments the government deems unpalatable.

Reforms to both disability and incapacity benefits are expected to save the Treasury about £4.8bn, according to government estimates. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is seen by rebels as one of the biggest obstacles to agreeing concessions.

Ministers already need to find £1.25bn to pay for a U-turn last month when they decided to retreat from mass cuts to the winter fuel payment.

“The possible U-turns on benefit and welfare spending have left the chancellor in a sticky position,” said Capital Economics’ Ruth Gregory, who predicts the chancellor may need to raise between £10bn and £20bn in the Autumn Budget.

“If the chancellor wishes to avoid an adverse reaction in the financial market, she probably has little choice but to raise taxes in the Autumn Budget.”  

One of the rebel ringleaders told the FT: “Tinkering with the eligibility criteria would not end this; what we are looking for is a wholesale rethink by the government, and now that they’ve seen the level of unhappiness in the [Parliamentary Labour party] they should consider very carefully.”