Three senior researchers from OpenAI have joined Meta’s elite Superintelligence team, marking a victory for the company in the artificial intelligence (AI) competition.
Co-founders of OpenAI’s Zurich office, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, have formally left OpenAI to join Meta in the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
In the European AI research arena, where Zurich has emerged as a key outpost for some of the most cutting-edge machine learning research, their departure represents a shift in the balance of power. They were hired as part of Meta’s massive, covert plan to take over the development of AGI. Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, which has extensive access to the company’s computing infrastructure and is tasked with creating AI models that can compete with or even outperform human reasoning, is at the heart of this. Founder, Mark Zuckerberg is not taking this change lightly.
According to several reports, Zuckerberg is now leading the charge on poaching, avoiding headhunting and HR altogether by using WhatsApp. He allegedly uses a group chat called “Recruiting Party” to coordinate efforts, and he hosts private dinners in his Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe homes afterwards. Despite being unorthodox, the strategy is beginning to show results.
Meta’s recent $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI is among its most notable victories to date. In exchange for a 49% share in the data-labeling business, Meta hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Scale, to spearhead the company’s superintelligence vision. This is one of Meta’s most costly strategic moves since acquiring WhatsApp, with Scale valued at $29 billion. It hasn’t been an easy journey, though, BrandSpur technology and information news reports.
OpenAI Co-founders, John Schulman and Ilya Sutskever have gone in different directions, and Meta has been unable to retain them. Sutskever is now leading Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a covert startup dedicated to creating safe artificial general intelligence. Schulman has joined another covert company run by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Their exits from OpenAI suggest a growing splintering of top-tier AI talent and ideological differences. In the meantime, Zuckerberg’s charm offensive has been publicly rejected by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Recently, Altman joked on a podcast with his brother Jack, stating: “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers].”
However, reality is rapidly shifting. Top researchers leaving, Meta’s multibillion-dollar wagers, and Zuckerberg’s obvious sense of urgency all suggest that the competition is only getting started and that Meta has no plans to fall behind. Senior hires are reportedly receiving compensation packages of over $100 million, which worries analysts about market distortion and the moral ramifications of so much power being concentrated in a small number of companies.
Although there has been a lot of talk about Meta’s open-source LLaMA models, many insiders admit the company has not kept up with competitors like Google and OpenAI in terms of adoption and performance. Meta appears to be fixing that—not just by investing money, but also by undergoing a structural change that puts the development of AGI at the forefront of its future.
