Missionaries vs. Mercenaries
OpenAI needs to become the next Meta.
In a leaked internal memo to employees, Sam Altman addressed Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to hire away its people. The AI talent war is in full swing and the future of OpenAI hinges on it.
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Missionaries will beat mercenaries. Those are the words Sam Altman chose in a leaked internal memo to employees last week, in response to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent AI talent-poaching spree.
The week before, TechCrunch reported that Meta had hired influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal, as well as three other researchers from the company. Then The Information reported four more top researchers jumping ship: Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren.
While initially brushing off Zuckerberg’s hiring attempts in a podcast with his brother, Altman could no longer pretend to be unfazed and tried to make the case to employees for why OpenAI is the place to be (and stay):
“What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. (…) And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way. Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be.”
As I was reading it, I couldn’t help asking myself: how different is OpenAI really from a company like Meta? They might not be comparable in size, but are they pursuing something meaningfully different?
Talent wars are economic wars
Make no mistake, the fight for AI talent is a form of economic warfare and thus war-speak is in order. Altman’s use of the phrase “missionaries will beat mercenaries” is a nod to the famous American investor and venture capitalist John Doerr. In product development, teams of so-called mercenaries feel no real sense of passion for the problem to be solved; and are thus less effective. (This is as true for business as it is for war. A hired army has no cause to fight for and lacks morale.)
In positioning his people as missionaries, Altman is claiming that the company’s mission is pure. It’s virtue signalling “we have values, they don’t”. But do they?
OpenAI once poached talent in the early stages of the company, in 2015, with the promise of being a research lab “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”, vowing to publish research and share patents openly. However, once they struck gold, the company turned closed-source quicker than Ilya Sutskever could say “feel the AGI”.
The now infamous deal with Microsoft was struck in 2019 as OpenAI founded a for-profit arm “in an attempt to increase its ability to raise capital while still serving its mission”. And this year, Altman planned to remove profit caps entirely, only to abandon those plans amid fierce backlash and the prospect of major legal repercussions, and announced a restructure as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) instead (similar to Anthropic and xAI). This restructure may look good on paper, but as senior writer Kelsey Piper pointed out in a recent Vox article:
“The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefiting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court.”
Another critique that has been raised is the quiet way in which OpenAI’s usage policy no longer explicitly prohibits the use of its technology for military and warfare purposes and the recent inking of a $200 million dollar contract with the US Department of Defense.
And let’s not forget the many lawsuits the company faces, most of them involving some form of alleged copyright infringement of journalists, artists, writers, which is ironic for a company that is said to exist for the benefit of all humanity.
OpenAI took on more investment than any company ever
As of today, OpenAI has taken on an unprecedented amount of investment, which of course brings with it the expectation of even greater returns. Under Altman’s leadership, the company raised a total of $57.9 billion over 11 funding rounds, the latest led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank who committed to investing $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation.
OpenAI is said to hit $12.7 Billion in revenue in 2025, but doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until 2029 at a projected $125 billion in revenue, meaning they would roughly need to double revenue every single year. To live up to this growth trajectory, the once research lab has transformed itself into a full-fledged product company, competing first and foremost with its own investor: Microsoft.
A Bloomberg article describes how Microsoft sales reps are being caught “flatfooted at a time when they’re under pressure to get Copilot into as many customers’ hands as possible”. Microsoft’s salesforce has struggled to differentiate Copilot from the much better-known ChatGPT, as both companies are essentially pitching the same thing. Kind of embarrassing.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly also stepping into the consulting space and has begun offering highly customized services starting at $10 million, positioning the company in direct competition with giants like Palantir and Accenture.
All of these moves are perfectly logical, given the company’s commitment to hypergrowth. They have no choice but to expand and capture market share in the most aggressive way possible.
In doing so, Altman is taking a page from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, arguably one of the most well-known books about building a business ever written. Some of you may know Thiel to be somewhat of a mentor of Altman. He contributed to Altman’s first venture fund as well as supporting his leadership at Y Combinator. The core idea behind his book is that every startup should strive for monopolization. To illustrate, a few quotes:
“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
“All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
The book is littered with aphorisms and larded with references to classical literature, art, and more. From Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Bacon. Frankly, I recommend anyone to read it if you want to understand the philosophical ideas and cultural attitudes underpinning the Silicon Valley mindset.
All of this is a longwinded way of saying that what Altman is trying to achieve with OpenAI, as evidenced by the investment he has taken on and his actions so far, is to become a monopoly.
OpenAI needs to become the next Meta
And they have no choice but to become one. It’s basically a requirement for success at this point. Need I remind you that a growth target of $125 billion in revenue for 2029 is an outrageously ambitious goal, if not insane. To put that number into perspective, Meta Platforms reported an annual revenue of $134.9 billion in 2023, which is only slightly higher than the number OpenAI has to hit in the next 4 years.
OpenAI has to make these targets to keep investors happy as they’ve invested extraordinary amounts of money in the company, expecting nothing but extraordinary returns.
One can only come to one conclusion: OpenAI needs to become the next Meta. OpenAI needs to become as big and successful as Meta within the next 4 years in order to survive. They are not just competing with Big Tech, they need to be Big Tech.
While I’m not passing judgement on the ambition, it’s interesting to see Altman present himself, and the company he founded, as being in the position to claim some kind of moral high ground over Mark Zuckerberg. Missionaries vs. mercenaries. Like Zuckerberg, Altman seems to be be willing to do whatever it takes to become a behemoth himself. And the human resources they are fighting over ultimately serve as a proxy for a bigger war: a real shot at monopolizing AI. It just sounds a lot less appealing when you put it that way, so instead, the company tells its employees they are there to “build AGI to the benefit of all humanity”.
Here Altman again took a page from the Thiel playbook, who suggested that the best kind of startups resemble cults:
“The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right.”
“A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
Instilling people with the feeling of being part of something bigger is instrumental to a company’s early success and something Altman has carefully cultivated within OpenAI from day 1. Not by accident, but by design.
And if you think I’m being overly cynical here, I’d like to leave you with a blogpost dating back to 2013, 2 years before Altman co-founded OpenAI:
Only a religious leader would characterize the labor of its employees as missionary work.
Take care,
— Jurgen
Watch recommendation:
This is an interview with , the author of the book Empire of AI, which describes the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion. The title of the video is awfully clickbait-y, but it makes for a good listen.