Meta, the company behind the Llama family of open-source models, has ‘poached’ three OpenAI researchers to join its efforts to build superintelligent systems, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday.
WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter, revealed that Meta has hired three researchers — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. They were responsible for setting up OpenAI’s office in Zurich, Switzerland, last year.
If true, this would be yet another move by Meta to boost talent within its company, as it tries to catch up with the competition.
Recently, Meta invested $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, an AI startup that helps enterprises develop their own AI models. Scale AI’s CEO, Alexander Wang, stepped down from the role and will lead Meta’s new ‘superintelligence’ team.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company also reportedly made an acquisition offer to Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. During its fundraising efforts, the startup was valued at around $32 billion. However, the offer was declined.
The company is trying to hire SSI co-founder Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to strengthen its new AI division, which is headed by Wang.
In a recent podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta offers extremely high compensation packages to OpenAI employees, including signing bonuses of up to $100 million.
While pursuing some of the best talent in the industry has been a familiar pattern historically, the strategy seems more important than ever in today’s AI-driven world.
According to reports, Apple is also reportedly looking to acquire Perplexity AI to boost its AI capabilities on its devices, which Meta had also considered before investing in Scale AI. Meta also looked into acquiring Thinking Machines, a startup founded by the former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati.
Previously, Anthropic was also engaged in a talent war with OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
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