OpenAI Poaches 3 Top Engineers From DeepMind

OpenAI announced today it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in a newly opened OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff in an internal memo on Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai will be joining the company to work on multimodal AI, artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different mediums ranging from images to audio.

OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its text-to-image platform Dall-E in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text inputs. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly within ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Sora, though it has yet to make it widely available.

All three of the newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer’s personal website. While he worked at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research that OpenAI was publishing and public controversies the company was embroiled in, which he frequently posted about to his more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI by its board of directors last year, Beyer posted that “the most sensible” explanation for the firing he had read so far was that Altman was involved in too many other startups at the same time.

As they race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals are intensely competing to hire a limited pool of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth close to seven figures or more. Hopping between companies is not uncommon for the most sought-after talent.

Tim Brooks, for example, who previously co-led the research direction of OpenAI’s unreleased video generator, recently departed to work at DeepMind. But the high-profile poaching spree extends well beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its AI lead, Mustafa Suleyman, away from Inflection AI in March—along with most of the startup’s employees. And Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the fold.

Over the past few months, a number of key figures at OpenAI have left the company, either to join direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic or launch their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and its former chief scientist, left to launch Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety and existential risks. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, announced she was leaving the company in September and is reportedly raising money for a new AI venture.

In October, OpenAI said that it was working on expanding globally. In addition to the new Zurich offices, the company plans to open new outposts in New York City, Seattle, Brussels, Paris, and Singapore, and already has outposts in London, Tokyo, and other cities, in addition to its San Francisco headquarters.

Zhai, Beyer, and Kolesnikov all live in Zurich, according to LinkedIn, which has become a relatively prominent tech hub in Europe. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a globally renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly poached a number of AI experts from Google to work at “a secretive European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.