OpenAI announced today that 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 Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai will join the company to work on multimodal AI, artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different media ranging from images to audio .
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and launched 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 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 on ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a long-awaited generative AI video product called Sora, although it has not yet made it widely available.
The three newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer. personal website. While working at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have closely followed the research OpenAI was publishing and the public controversies the company was embroiled in, frequently posting to its more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted of OpenAI by its board of directors last year, Beyer aware that the “most sensible” explanation for the firing I had read so far was that Altman was involved in many other startups at the same time.
As they compete to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals compete intensely to hire a limited pool of the best researchers around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth about seven figures or more. Jumping from one company to another is not uncommon for the most sought-after talent.
Tim BrooksFor example, who previously co-led the research direction for OpenAI’s unreleased video generator, recently left DeepMind. But the wave of high-profile poaching extends far beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its AI leader, Mustafa Suleymanaway 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, several key OpenAI figures have left the company, either to join direct competitors such as DeepMind and Anthropic or to launch their own companies. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI and former chief scientist, left to launch Secure superintelligencea startup focused on AI security and existential risks. Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, announced she was leaving the company in September and reportedly raising money for an AI startup.
In October, OpenAI said it was working to expand 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 offices in London, Tokyo and other cities, in addition to its headquarters in San Francisco.
Zhai, Beyer and Kolesnikov 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 world-renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly surreptitiously hired several AI experts from Google to work in “a secret European laboratory in Zurich,” the Financial times reported earlier this year.