Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta

OpenAI researcher Jason Wei is joining Meta’s new superintelligence lab, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Wei worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step. At OpenAI, Wei became a self-described “diehard” for reinforcement learning, a method of training or refining an AI model with positive or negative feedback. It’s become a promising area of AI research—one that several of the researchers Meta has hired for its superintelligence team specialize in.

One source tells WIRED that another OpenAI researcher, Hyung Won Chung, will also be joining Meta. Multiple sources confirm that both Wei and Chung’s internal OpenAI Slack profiles are currently deactivated. OpenAI, Meta, Wei, and Chung did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.

Chung worked on some of the same projects at OpenAI as Wei, including deep research and OpenAI’s o1 model, according to Chung’s personal website. His research is primarily focused on reasoning and agents, the website says. Chung overlapped with Wei at Google as well, and joined OpenAI at the same time as Wei, per their LinkedIn profiles.

Multiple sources tell WIRED that Wei and Chung have a close working relationship. Meta has previously poached groups of researchers that have experience working together for its new superintelligence lab, including a trio from OpenAI’s Switzerland office that joined the ChatGPT maker from Google.

Meta has been going on a poaching spree over the past month, offering up to $300 million over four years to top AI talent. WIRED reported late last month that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an internal memo to staff that laid out a fresh plan for the company’s AI efforts. It included a list of new staffers for the superintelligence team, most of whom had been recruited from OpenAI.

The hiring frenzy shows no signs of slowing down, and OpenAI has been fighting back. Just last week, WIRED reported that OpenAI had recruited four high-ranking engineers from Tesla, xAI, and Meta.

On Tuesday, Wei shared a post on social media reflecting on what he called “an important lesson” that reinforcement learning taught him “about how to live my own life.”

In life, (and when building AI models), imitation is good and you have to do it at first, Wei wrote. But “beating the teacher requires walking your own path and taking risks and rewards from the environment.”