Meta 'robs' key OpenAI personnel

Meta continues to expand its ambitions to develop artificial super intelligence (AI) by attracting a series of experts from leading laboratories, including OpenAI.

Meta continues to recruit staff for its new AI mega-project. Photo: Reuters .

According to The Information , four key researchers, Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren, have left OpenAI to join Meta's superintelligence team. Their internal Slack accounts at the company that owns ChatGPT have been deactivated.

Hongyu Ren led the post-training of OpenAI’s mini-o3 and o4 models, including the crucial fine-tuning step on large datasets. Shengjia Zhao is a highly regarded deep learning expert who worked on the GPT-4 model. Jiahui Yu, a former Google DeepMind employee, joined OpenAI in late 2023. Shuchao Bi is responsible for managing multimodal models at the company.

Mark Chen, Director of Research at OpenAI, immediately sent a letter to the entire company, affirming that measures would be taken to retain employees who received lucrative offers from Meta.

“I feel a deep sense of foreboding right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote in the letter.

Meta has also recruited three other OpenAI experts who are working in the Zurich office: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. All of them worked at DeepMind before moving to OpenAI and helping to build the company's office in Switzerland late last year.

According to CEO Sam Altman, Meta has made huge offers with total salary packages up to 100 million USD to attract personnel from OpenAI.

“None of our best people have said yes,” CEO Sam Altman said at an event on June 24. But he also acknowledged that Meta is a formidable competitor.

Mark Zuckerberg appeared to be personally involved in the hiring campaign in April after Meta’s latest AI model failed to live up to expectations. In May, the WSJ reported that Meta had delayed the release of its latest AI version. To turn things around, the tech giant went big, investing $14 billion in AI startup Scale and hiring CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its new AI team.

Not stopping there, Zuckerberg also tried to attract the two co-founders of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, but failed. However, with a projected budget of up to 65 billion USD for spending in 2025, Meta shows its determination to become a leading giant in the next wave of innovation in Silicon Valley.

Source: https://znews.vn/meta-cuop-nhan-su-chu-chot-cua-openai-post1564667.html