Meta recruits seven top AI researchers from OpenAI, intensifying the talent war

Meta Platforms is rapidly building its artificial intelligence (AI) muscle by continuing to hire top researchers from rival OpenAI.

According to the recent update, the company has brought on four more AI scientists: Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. These researchers have reportedly accepted offers to join Meta’s AI division, although their specific roles have not been publicly disclosed.

This wave of new hires comes just on the heels of the poaching of three additional, prominent researchers from OpenAI’s office in Zurich. 

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai were leaving OpenAI to work for Meta. All three have strong expertise in computer vision and deep learning.

Media outlets contacted Meta and OpenAI for comment on the matter, but they both declined to comment. 

Zuckerberg accelerates AI superintelligence plans

The hires represent a major push by Zuckerberg to put his company on the map in the race to develop AI systems that reason, learn and make decisions at or beyond the level of human ability. 

The quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is one of Meta’s most critical long-term missions, according to Zuckerberg, who has called for a concerted, open-source effort to build this technology.

Meta’s approach is in marked contrast to that of OpenAI, which has taken a more closed model. OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft and closely controls how its models, including GPT-4, are used. 

Still, Meta has been releasing more of its research and models to the open-source community. This has drawn researchers interested in transparency and scientific freedom, a potential reason top talent is moving.

The new hires are being brought in to work on Meta’s next-gen AI models, namely its Llama series and more general AGI projects, which belong to Meta’s AI research group, FAIR (Facebook AI Research). The group is developing a powerful multimodal system to understand and generate text, images, audio, and video at human-level quality.

Top researchers leave OpenAI for Meta

The OpenAI departures have questioned how things are working internally at the company. OpenAI remains one of the most important AI labs in the world, having released the revolutionary ChatGPT and DALL-E models. Still, several of its key staff members have defected to competitors in recent months. Meta’s poaching raid seems to be the most deliberate yet.

Industry experts say the race for top AI talent has entered a fierce new phase. With AGI seen as the ultimate prize in tech, companies are pulling out all the stops to attract the brightest minds. They’re offering huge salaries, top-tier equipment, full support teams, and unlimited access to data and testing tools—plus the freedom to explore bold, unconventional ideas in the pursuit of building the intelligent machines of tomorrow.

With its huge resources and fresh strategic impetus, Meta is suddenly a compelling place to go.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has been scrutinized for its structure, especially since a dramatic late 2023 board shake-up that saw CEO Sam Altman briefly ousted and later reinstated.

Some insiders say the turmoil may have affected morale and retention, even as the organization persists in rolling out technical achievements. As Meta steadily lures in more researchers from competing labs, the borders in the AI arms race are being redrawn.

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