Athira Sethu
Kochi, 26 June 2025
Meta, the owner of Facebook, has recruited three lead researchers from OpenAI to staff its “superintelligence” project, according to a report. The news comes only a few days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of attempting to poach OpenAI workers by offering them big bonuses.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the three researchers—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—were all based in OpenAI’s Zurich office. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the three had left the company but did not give more details. Meta has not commented on the matter yet.
Altman recently stated that Meta was making bonuses worth up to $100 million available to OpenAI employees in an attempt to poach them. He added that Meta views OpenAI as its greatest rival in the area of artificial intelligence (AI).
Meta has been grappling with the loss of employees and slowness in releasing new open-source AI models. The models were supposed to keep pace with other top AI systems produced by Google, OpenAI, and Chinese technology firm DeepSeek.
To shift direction, Meta is currently establishing a new team to develop “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). AGI is AI that thinks, learns, and reasons like a human, not specifically for narrow tasks.
As part of this initiative, Meta has recently hired 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI. Meta has also acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion to give it a boost in the AI race.
Zuckerberg’s recent actions demonstrate that Meta is committed to becoming a leader in cutting-edge AI. Through the acquisition of top talent and significant investments in both talent and technology, the firm is positioning itself to create smarter, more capable AI systems that potentially can remake the future.
In short, Meta is making aggressive moves to be a player in the expanding artificial intelligence universe, and bringing in talent from OpenAI is a central part of the strategy.
