Meta Reportedly Hires Away 3 Researchers From OpenAI

Meta has reportedly convinced three of OpenAI’s researchers to jump ship.

Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, all stationed with OpenAI’s Zurich office, have been hired by the social media giant for its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts, the Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday (June 25), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The report noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally campaigning to hire new AI expertise to bolster his company’s flagging AI efforts.

In some cases, that has meant offering $100 million to researchers willing to join Meta’s team working on artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI that can perform tasks at or above the level of humans.

Meta also recently invested $14 billion in AI startup Scale and brought its CEO Alexandr Wang on board to oversee the new team.

According to the WSJ, Zuckerberg has also tried to recruit OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, though both have declined. The report also pointed out that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said onstage at an event earlier this week that he wasn’t concerned about Zuckerberg’s efforts to poach his team.

“It’s like OK, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing. What’s next?” he said. Altman also recently said his best people hadn’t departed for Meta.

As covered here earlier this week, Zuckerberg has reportedly approached numerous high-profile AI companies about possible acquisitions. In addition to Scale, those startups include Perplexity, Runway, Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence, the latter two founded by former top executives at OpenAI. And as PYMNTS noted, it’s not only Meta trying to beef up its AI roster.

“The recruitment push comes at a time when competition for skilled AI talent has reached a fever pitch, with companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and Anthropic vying for the same pool of geniuses,” the report said.

The heightened focus on AI talent is also happening as Meta wants to expand the capabilities of its Llama AI model and integrate advanced AI into its products. The company’s AI-driven features now power everything from content recommendations on Instagram to conversational assistants in WhatsApp.

The company is also exploring AI agents to enhance customer service and commerce across its platforms.