OpenAI isn’t taking things lightly after Meta poached at least 8 top researchers from the company in just the last week.
Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, has sent a forceful memo to his staff after news broke of Meta having hired many top OpenAI researchers with high salaries and bonuses. “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote in a memo accessed by Wired. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”
Chen directly named Meta in his memo. “Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages,” he wrote.
Chen said that he has “high personal standards of fairness” and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. “While I’ll fight to keep every one of you, I won’t do so at the price of fairness to others,” he wrote. Fighting in this context seems to mean OpenAI offering similar compensation structures and bonuses as Meta has been luring OpenAI employees with, without making things unfair for employees who weren’t contacted by Meta. Chen hinted that he didn’t want large levels of discrepancy between OpenAI employees, with those getting Meta offers ending up with much higher paychecks than those without.
“We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute (a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year) into intelligence,” Chen wrote. “This is the main quest, and it’s important to remember that skirmishes with Meta are the side quest.
Another message by a senior leader asked OpenAI employees to tell Meta to back off if they made massive offers which were only valid for a brief period of time. “If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it’s not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision. I’d like to be able to talk to you through it and I know all about their offers,” they said.
OpenAI CEO backed Chen publicly on Slack as a response to his message. “It’s been really amazing to watch Mark’s leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions,” Altman wrote on Slack in response to Chen’s message. “Very grateful we have him as our leader!”
These Slack messages have been precipitated by a sustained effort by Meta to pull away researchers from OpenAI. Over the last week alone, eight OpenAI researchers have jumped ship to Meta. These included Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zha from the Zurich office, Trapit Bansal, Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren, Shuchao Bi and Shengjia Zhao. A few weeks prior, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly said that Meta was offering “$100 million bonuses” to OpenAI’s talent, and the best researchers weren’t leaving.