After Meta had poached several OpenAI employees with multi-hundred million dollar job offers, the knives seem to be out in the open between the two companies.
OpenAI employee Steven Heidel has trolled Meta’s new AI Chief Alexandr Wang over the company’s new AI chatbots. “We are truly only investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs as a company,” Alexandr Wang had posted on X over reports that Meta was restructuring its AI division and could lay off some people. “Any reporting to the contrary of that is clearly mistaken,” he had added.
OpenAI’s Steven Heidel, who worked with the company’s API, didn’t respond to the comments about the restructuring, but instead said “who’s your favorite Meta AI character? russian girl? step mom?”
Users had earlier spotted AI characters named “Russian Girl” and “Step Mom” on Facebook. These AI characters role-played as their namesakes, and were likely designed for conversations of an adult nature.
This isn’t the first time that Meta is trying out such AI characters. We’d reported in February this year that Meta had launched similar user-created characters on Instagram. These AI bots had names like “sexy_girlfriend”, that were willing to flirt and undress for users on chat.
OpenAI’s Steven Heidel seemed to be highlighting the presence of such sexualized AI characters on Meta’s platform in his response to Wang — while Meta has been claiming to build superintelligence, some of its research was being seemingly directed into such endeavours, which might be important for consumer apps, but are unlikely to motivate the best researchers.
Alexandr Wang, however, had started off the jibes at OpenAI. After sharing a picture of three OpenAI employees who’d joined Meta, Wang had quipped “you may recognize them from livestreams”, rubbing in the fact that Meta had managed to poach away some of OpenAI’s top researchers who’d appeared in their public-facing demos. OpenAI employees now seem to be hitting back by highlighting some of the more dubious aspects of Meta’s work. It remains to be seen how these battles shape in the coming months, but at the moment, there seems to be no love lost between Meta and OpenAI employees, even on public platforms.