The competition for talent in artificial intelligence (AI) among big tech companies is intensifying. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently invested in the AI startup Scale AI, and successfully recruited three researchers from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 26th.
This news of talent acquisition comes about a week after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, mentioned that "Meta offered bonuses of up to $100 million to lure OpenAI employees, but no one accepted it."
A source familiar with the matter told WSJ that "Meta has hired three researchers who worked at OpenAI's office in Zurich, Switzerland." They are known to have established OpenAI's Swiss office at the end of last year and had previously all worked together at Google's AI division, DeepMind. OpenAI also confirmed that these researchers have left the company.
They are expected to work at the "Superintelligence Research Institute" established by Meta. WSJ stated, "The recruitment of OpenAI researchers is a move to reinforce talent for AI projects."
Earlier, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI to reach 'superintelligent AI' systems that exceed human intelligence, and recruited the company's founder, Alexander Wang.
Daniel Gross, CEO of the AI startup "Safe Superintelligence" (SSI), founded by Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has also joined the Superintelligence Research Institute.
Meta is also focusing on a wide range of talent acquisition in AI, exploring acquisitions of search engine startup Perplexity AI and video generation startup Runway AI, among others. It has been reported that after the performance of Meta's latest large language model (LLM) LLaMA 4 fell below expectations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took direct action in talent acquisition in AI.