Meta Offering $100M Bonus To Leave OpenAI

OpenAI is pushing deeper into high-stakes government and developer markets while keeping off pressure from rivals and partners alike. The corporate just signed a $200 million U.S. Department of Defense one-year contract to prototype AI systems for military use, including cyber defense, data ops, and healthcare. This kicks off “OpenAI for Government,” offering secured versions of its models like ChatGPT Gov, with strict rules banning surveillance, biometrics, or weaponized use.

While the deal deepens federal integration, OpenAI’s internal politics are heating up. Microsoft, which has invested billions and provides cloud infrastructure through Azure, is pushing back on OpenAI’s attempts to restructure its corporate model and withhold IP from its newly acquired coding startup Windsurf. Microsoft argues that its 2023 agreement grants it access to that IP, particularly given Windsurf’s overlap with GitHub.

On the developer front, OpenAI released a public GitHub demo of an AI-powered front-end testing tool that interprets natural language to generate and run browser-based tests, an early application of its “Computer-Using Agent” architecture. Nevertheless, this progress is tempered by backlash over the planned API deprecation of GPT-4.5 Preview, a model developers had come to depend on for its tonal precision and stability. Despite OpenAI signaling this sunset months earlier, the short timeline and lack of direct alternatives have sparked frustration.

Adding to the competitive pressure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed Meta is attempting to lure away OpenAI staff with $100,000,000 signing bonuses. To date, Altman claims none have left, asserting OpenAI’s edge in AGI development and long-term valuation. Read more.

Meta just named the primary group of firms in its Llama Startup Program, early-stage teams constructing real products with Meta’s Llama language models. Chosen from over 1,000 applicants, these startups are tackling the whole lot from automating healthcare admin to turning educational text into dynamic lessons and creating AI legal assistants. Meta is giving them hands-on technical support and cloud credits to chop infrastructure costs and speed up construct time. It’s a calculated push to expand Llama’s reach and keep developers inside Meta’s ecosystem.

At the identical time, Meta is expanding its smart glasses lineup with recent Oakley and Prada models through an prolonged cope with EssilorLuxottica. The Oakley release is about for June 20, following the strong performance of Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration, which has sold over 2 million units. A 3rd-generation Ray-Ban model, expected this holiday season, will reportedly include a micro display. Read more.

Google has launched its Gemini 2.5 model family into full production, aiming squarely at enterprise adoption with a practical mixture of performance, scale, and value control. The lineup includes Gemini 2.5 Pro for complex reasoning and multimodal tasks, Flash for high-throughput applications, and the brand new Flash-Litea lean, efficient model built for fast, low-cost processing. All models support tool integrations, handle as much as one million tokens in context, and offer controllable “considering time,” allowing developers to fine-tune performance based on task complexity and budget.

Flash-Litenow in preview, is Google’s best offering yet. It outperforms previous Lite models across key benchmarks in math, science, programming, and visual understanding, while keeping latency and costs low. Its flat-rate pricing, $0.10 per million input tokens, $0.40 for output, simplifies budgeting, especially for large-scale tasks like classification and translation. With early adoption by firms in AR, healthcare, and software testing, Google is positioning Gemini as a stable, production-ready alternative for enterprise AI workloads. Read more.