OpenAI Loses Four Key Researchers to Meta

Mark Zuckerberg has been working to poach talent from rival labs for his new superintelligence team.

Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED.

Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures.

It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark Zuckerberg, who is racing to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in building artificial general intelligence. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has been making “giant offers” to OpenAI staffers with “$100 million signing bonuses.” He added that, “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” A source at OpenAI confirmed the offers.