OpenAI announced this 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 join the company to work on multimodal AI, artificial intelligence models that can perform tasks in different media ranging from visuals to audio.
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI, releasing the first version of its text-to-image platform Dall-E in 2021. However, its flagship chatbot ChatGPT could initially only communicate with text input. The company later added voice and vision capabilities as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly in ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Sora, although it has yet to be made generally available.
According to Beyer's personal website, all three newly hired researchers are already working closely together. While at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research that OpenAI published and the public controversies in which the company was embroiled, which he regularly posted about to his 70,000-plus followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman briefly became Beyer ousted by OpenAI's board of directors last year, stating that “the most sensible” explanation for the dismissal he had read so far was that Altman was involved in too many other startups at the same time. time.
As they race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals compete intensely to hire a limited group of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth nearly seven figures or more. Hopping between companies is not unusual for the most sought-after talent.
For example, Tim Brooks, who previously co-led the research direction of OpenAI's unreleased video generator, recently left to join DeepMind. But the high-profile poaching extends far beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its AI leader, Mustafa Suleyman, 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.
In recent months, a number of key figures at OpenAI have left the company, either to join direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic or to launch their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI and former chief scientist, left to launch Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety and existential risks. Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, announced in September that she was leaving the company and is reportedly raising money for a new AI venture.
In October, OpenAI said it was expanding globally. In addition to the new offices in Zurich, 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, which has become a relatively prominent technology hub in Europe, according to LinkedIn. 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 in “a secret European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.
