Meta isn’t just poaching OpenAI’s employees by the dozen — it’s rubbing it in for maximum effect.
Meta’s new Superintelligence Lab Chief Alexandr Wang has trolled OpenAI after poaching yet another employee from OpenAI. “Welcome to the team Hyung Won Chung, Jason Wei and Zhiqing Sun,” he posted on X. “Some may recognize them from various recent livestreams,” he added.
All three have appeared on OpenAI’s livestreams through which it launches new products and updates. Hyung Won Chung and Jason Wei are long-term collaborators, and had appeared together on OpenAI’s December 2024 livestream when they’d introduced the o1 model.
Zhiqing Sun too had appeared with Sam Altman in a recent livestream.
Alexandr Wang now shared a picture of the three of them posing together for a selfie. “After a great time at OpenAI, we recently joined Meta Superintelligence Labs,” wrote Hyung Won Chung. “The first month has already been so much fun building from a clean slate with a truly talent-dense team! Very excited about the compute and long term focus of the new lab,” he added.
“Old friends, new lab,” wrote Jason Wei. “Excited to share that I recently joined the MSL team! Building personal superintelligence is serious and fun here. Join us!” wrote Zhiqing Sun.
Meta has now poached at least 11 top researchers from OpenAI. It’s getting bolder about its moves too — Meta’s AI Chief Alexandr Wang is highlighting how these were crucial OpenAI researchers while poaching them. Incidentally, Alexandr Wang and Sam Altman have a history together — Wang had joined YC when Altman was its President, and Altman indirectly held a stake in Wang’s startup, Scale AI. OpenAI was also one of Scale’s most important customers, and did data annotation and RLHF work for the company. Wang and Altman were also briefly flatmates during the pandemic. But after Meta took a 49 percent stake in Scale AI for $14 billion, OpenAI and Scale stopped working together. And Wang now seems to be hitting Altman where it hurts most by poaching away his top talent and then bragging about it. It remains to be seen how these moves play out, but at the moment, OpenAI seems to have no answers for Meta’s deep pockets which it is using to great effect in the AI race.