{"id":37732,"date":"2025-07-26T02:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T02:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/37732\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T02:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T02:16:10","slug":"meta-just-escalated-the-ai-talent-war-with-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/37732\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Just Escalated the AI Talent War With OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta just escalated the AI talent war<\/a> with OpenAI.<\/p>\n

Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, is joining Meta as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Labs.<\/p>\n

CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> announced Zhao’s appointment on Friday in a social media post, and called him a “pioneer” in the field who has already driven several major AI breakthroughs.<\/p>\n

Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led synthetic data efforts at OpenAI. According to the post, Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Meta’s newly appointed chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang<\/a>, the founder and CEO of Scale AI.<\/p>\n

The new hire comes during Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar AI spending spree, including a $15 billion investment in Scale AI<\/a> and the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new division focused on foundational models and next-gen research.<\/p>\n

In addition to Zhao, the company has lured away the three researchers who built OpenAI’s Zurich office \u2014 Lucas Beyer<\/a>, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai \u2014 all of whom previously also worked at Google’s DeepMind. The Superintelligence Labs team is now comprised of a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.<\/p>\n

But the war for AI talent is far from over.<\/p>\n

Databricks VP Naveen Rao likened the competition to “looking for LeBron James,” estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build frontier AI models.<\/p>\n

Companies without the cash for massive pay packages are turning to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas<\/a> said a Meta researcher he tried to poach told him to ask again when the company has “10,000 H100s.”<\/p>\n

AI tech workers have previously told Business Insider that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has been emailing prospects directly<\/a> and even hosting AI researchers at his home, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made personal calls to potential hires.<\/p>\n

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Tech company executives have mixed feelings about Meta’s poaching efforts.<\/p>\n

“Meta right now are not at the frontier, maybe they’ll they’ll manage to get back on there,” said Demis Hassabis<\/a>, the CEO of Google DeepMind, on an episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” which aired on Friday.<\/p>\n

“It’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective because they’re behind and they need to do something,” Hassabis added.<\/p>\n

During a July 18 episode of the podcast “Uncapped with Jack Altman,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> criticised some of Meta’s “giant offers” to his company’s employees, and called the strategy “crazy.”<\/p>\n

“The degree to which they’re focusing on money and not the work and not the mission,” said Sam Altman. “I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture.”<\/p>\n

Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta just escalated the AI talent war with OpenAI. Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-37732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}