Meta is seemingly in no mood to stop its talent raids on OpenAI.
Two more OpenAI researchers have left OpenAI for Meta, Wired reports. These include Jason Wei, who worked on chain-of-thought reasoning on the o1 and Deep Research models, and Hyung Won Chung, who also worked on the same initiatives. Both these researchers’ Slack accounts at OpenAI are reportedly deactivated.
Both Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung were senior researchers, and had appeared with Sam Altman in a livestream in December 2024, which had introduced OpenAI’s o1 Pro model.
Jason Wei had worked at Google from 2020 to 2022. He’d joined OpenAI in February 2023 as a Member of the Technical Staff. Last week, Wei had said that self-improving AI didn’t yet exist, and there wouldn’t likely be a fast takeoff in AI capabilities. Hyung Won Chung, meanwhile, has a PhD from MIT and had worked with Google from 2019 to 2023. Like Wei, he’d joined OpenAI in February 2023 as a Research Scientist.
These two researchers are the latest in the rapidly-growing list of employees Meta has poached from OpenAI. Thus far, Meta has poached at least 8 top employees from OpenAI. These include Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, who were responsible for establishing OpenAI’s office in Zurich. In addition, Meta has snagged Trapit Bansal from OpenAI. Meta has also managed to pull away Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren, Shuchao Bi and Shengjia Zhao from the company.
These employees had reportedly been given offers of as much as $300 million to join Meta. OpenAI’s head of recruiting had alleged that Meta had been giving these researchers “exploding offers” — which promised a massive sum of money, but were valid for a very short period of time — which was making these researchers jump ship. Meta is heavily investing in compute as well, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying yesterday that it was setting up new datacenters the size of Manhattan, and claimed that Meta would have the “greatest amount of compute” per researcher.
But regardless of how these researchers are leaving, these exits would raise alarm bells at OpenAI. Not long ago, researchers at OpenAI had posted in unison that OpenAI was “nothing without its people” when Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had been removed, and other employees had threatened to follow them. But with employees leaving OpenAI in droves, likely motivated by higher compensation packages, OpenAI would need to quickly take steps to stem this flow of talent.