Mark Zuckerberg’s crazy plan to snap up AI talents with personalized outreach, aggressive pitching and eight-digit bonuses. Meta recruits Openai employees Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai to join its newly formed team dedicated to advanced forms of AI, as the Wall Street Journal first reported.
The three researchers, who previously worked at Google Deepmind and are relatively new to Openai, opened an office in Zurich by Chatgpt-MM-Maker late last year. An Openai spokesman confirmed that the three had left the company but declined to comment further.
Openai CEO Sam Altman So far, Zuckerberg’s efforts to poach employees don’t seem to be shocked. “Like, well, Zuckerberg is doing something new crazy, what’s next?” Ultraman Hard fork Podcast this week.
Earlier this month, the scale of the Meta hiring push became clear earlier this month when the company brought Alexandr Wang, 28, the company invested more than $14 billion. Wang is expected to play a central role in Meta’s new AI division, a team of about 50 people dedicated to developing ultra-wisdom, a form of AI with more than humans.
In 2025, Zuckerberg launched an aggressive spending campaign to accelerate Meta’s AI ambitions and expand its data center and hardware infrastructure as the company’s progress in the field became increasingly frustrated. In addition to planning to spend up to $72 billion in capital expenditure this year, he has gone to great lengths to attract competitors’ top talents, personally selling recruits at his home and re-arranged office seats to position the nearby super smart team.
Earlier this month No cover podcast. “So far, none of our best people have decided to accept that,” he said. But that’s not because of the lack of attempts – Meta has obviously tried and hasn’t recruited OpenAI employees, including researchers Noam Brown and Bill Peebles and co-founder John Schulman.
Openai is not the only company for Zuckerberg radar. The billionaire is also reportedly trying to get super intelligence that is confusing AI and security, a startup founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. According to CNBC, after Meta was rejected by the latter, it recruited two other key figures of security superintelligence – Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. Other notable staff include Jack Rae of Google Deepmind and Johan Schalkwyk of Sesame AI.
With Meta building a new AI division, it isn’t the only player that has fueled a full-scale recruitment war. In response to Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment strategy, competitor companies have begun promoting employees or increasing their compensation to maintain top talent. Shortly after Meta approached Google Deepmind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, shortly after Meta approached Google Deepmind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, the researchers were promoted to Google’s chief AI architect, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, according to Bloomberg. Openai also reportedly refuted Meta’s proposal by providing target employees with more money and greater responsibility.
