Zuckerberg’s ‘Giant’ Offers Pay Off? Meta Said To Have Lured 3 OpenAI Researchers Into ‘Superintelligence’ Group

Close on the heels of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman disclosing that Meta chased its artificial intelligence (AI) engineers, promising largesse, a report said a trio of researchers from the AI startup has jumped ship.

The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Meta has hired OpenAI’s Zurich-based researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai.

These personnel have not updated their LinkedIn profile to reflect the shift. All three have been with OpenAI for seven months or less, after tenures of over six years at Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google, with their latest stints at Google’s DeepMind AI unit.

The Journal said an OpenAI spokesperson has confirmed the departure of the three researchers.

In the “Uncapped with Jack Altman” podcast hosted by his brother last week, Altman said Meta started making “giant offers” like $100 million signing bonuses and more in yearly compensation. But he added that none of the company’s best personnel have decided to take them up.

Meta stock is up over 21% this year as the company integrates AI into its product offerings, and the ad spending has improved from the lows seen in 2022. 

Meanwhile, Meta led by its co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was rumored to have assembled a “secretive new team,” internally dubbed the “superintelligence group,” in its pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).  

Zuckerberg himself was interviewing personnel from a brain trust of AI researchers and engineers at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto.

While Meta confirmed taking a minority stake worth $14 billion in Scale AI and hired its founder Alexander Wang, multiple reports suggested the company had informally discussed acquiring other AI startups including Perplexity, Runway, and former OpenAI executive Illya Sutskever’s Safe Intelligence.

None of these discussions reportedly progressed to the stage of a formal offer. 

The Wall Street Journal report also said some OpenAI researchers turned down Meta’s offer, and the Altman-led company made counteroffers to retain them. 

As AI technology slowly and steadily becomes all-pervasive, companies with deep pockets, especially the mega-caps, are spending through the nose to gain an upper hand. While releasing its first-quarter results in late March, Meta projected capex to be in the range of $64.72 billion, citing additional data center investments to support its AI efforts and higher infrastructure hardware costs.

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