At the moment when AI is reshaping the world, the competition of industry giants against top AI talent has also increased. According to recent reports, Meta succeeded in excavating three key researchers from Open AI, despite the fact that CEO Sam Altman, a competitor, had publicly mocked Mark Zuckerberg’s “high-handed” strategy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the newest members to join the Meta “Super Smart Team” are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. It is worth noting that Zhou Xiaohua was the founder of the OpenAI Zurich office. Their alliance shows that Zuckerberg’s heavy-money strategy is working.
Altman recently revealed, for the first time in a podcast co-chaired by his brother Jack, that Zuckerberg had launched a comprehensive remuneration programme worth over $100 million to attract Openai’s top talent. More specific details were revealed in a follow-up to the Wall Street Journal: Zuckerberg personally contacted hundreds of top AI researchers through the WhatsApp. He coordinated the target through a chat group called the “Recruit Party” and then lobbied for dinner at his home in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.
Zuckerberg has recently successfully engaged the CEO of Scale AI, Alexander Wang, and Meta invested $14 billion in his company, making the young 28-year-old CEO one of the most expensive “deep corners” in the history of technology. However, the Wall Street Journal notes that Meta CEO failed in its pursuit of “greater prey”, including Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, the co-founders of OpenAI, both of whom subsequently chose to co-found new start-ups.
Among the previous podcasts, Altman commented on Zuckerberg’s charisma: “I am really happy that, at least so far, none of our best talent has decided to accept [the proposals].” Now, with the three core researchers joining, this self-confidence statement by Altmann seems to have been broken by reality.
Meta’s three core researchers, who successfully exploited OpenAI, highlighted the intense competition in the AI talent market. As super-intellectual intelligence becomes the focus of competition for technology giants, brain mobility will become one of the key variables for industry development. Through this recruitment, Meta not only enhanced its technical strength, but also conveyed to the outside world its determination to catch up in the field of AI.