Mark Zuckerberg’s frenzied plan to snap up A.I. expertise by way of customized outreach, aggressive pitches and eight-figure bonuses seems to be paying off. Meta has recruited OpenAI staffers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai to be part of its newly-formed staff devoted to superior types of A.I., as first reported by the Wall Road Journal.
The three researchers all previously labored at Google DeepMind and had been comparatively new to OpenAI, having been tapped by the ChatGPT-maker on the finish of final yr to open an workplace in Zurich. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed that the trio have departed the corporate however declined to remark additional.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has up to now appeared unfazed by Zuckerberg’s efforts to poach his staffers. “It’s like, okay, Zuckerberg is performing some new insane factor, what’s subsequent?” Altman mentioned on the Exhausting Fork podcast this week.
The size of Meta’s hiring push turned clear earlier this month when the corporate introduced on Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI, following an funding of greater than $14 billion in his firm. Wang is anticipated to play a central position in Meta’s new A.I. unit, a roughly 50-person staff targeted on creating superintelligence, a type of A.I. with capabilities surpassing these of people.
In 2025, Zuckerberg has launched an aggressive spending marketing campaign to speed up Meta’s A.I. ambitions and develop its knowledge middle and {hardware} infrastructure amid rising frustration with the corporate’s progress within the area. Alongside plans to spend as much as $72 billion on capital expenditures this yr, he’s pulling out all of the stops to lure prime expertise from opponents, personally pitching recruits at his properties and rearranging workplace seating to place the superintelligence staff close by.
In some circumstances, Meta has tried to entice staff at OpenAI by promising signing bonuses as excessive as $100 million, revealed Altman earlier this month on an episode of the Uncapped podcast. “Thus far, none of our greatest folks have determined to take them up on that,” he mentioned. However that’s not for lack of making an attempt—Meta has apparently tried, and failed, to recruit OpenAI staffers together with researchers Noam Brown and Invoice Peebles and co-founder John Schulman.
OpenAI isn’t the one firm on Zuckerberg’s radar. The billionaire reportedly additionally tried to amass Perplexity AI and Secure Superintelligence, the A.I. startup co-founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. After Meta was rebuffed by the latter, it as an alternative recruited two of Secure Superintelligence’s different key figures—Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, in keeping with CNBC. Different notable hires embrace Google DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Sesame AI’s Johan Schalkwyk.
As Meta builds out its new A.I. unit, it’s not the one participant fueling an all-out hiring battle. In response to Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment techniques, rival corporations have begun selling workers or boosting compensation to retain prime expertise. Shortly after Meta approached Google DeepMind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, the researcher was promoted to Google’s chief A.I. architect, reporting on to CEO Sundar Pichai, in keeping with Bloomberg. OpenAI has additionally reportedly countered Meta’s overtures by providing focused staff more cash and better obligations.
