OpenAI announced today that it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from the rival Google DeepMind, all of which will work on a new opening OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff in an internal memo Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai will join the company to work on multimodal AI. artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks in different media ranging from images to audio.
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its text-to-image platform Dall-E in 2021. However, its flagship chatbot ChatGPT was initially only capable of interact with text entries. The company later added voice i image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly from ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called soraalthough it has yet to make it widely available.
The three newly hired researchers already work closely together, according to Beyer’s personal website. While working at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research OpenAI was publishing and the public controversies the company was embroiled in, posting frequently to its more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted of OpenAI by its board of directors last year, Beyer published that the “most sane” explanation for the firing I’d read so far was that Altman was involved in too many other startups at the same time.
As they race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its rivals are competing intensely hire a limited pool of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual compensation packages worth close to seven figures or more Jumping between companies is not uncommon for the most sought-after talent.
Tim Brooksfor example, who previously led the research direction of OpenAI’s novel video generator, recently left to work at DeepMind. But the high-profile poaching extends far beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its AI leader, Mustafa Suleymanaway from Inflection AI in March, along with most of the startup’s employees. And Google as reported paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the fold.
Over the past few months, a number of key OpenAI figures have left the company, either to join direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic or to launch their own companies. Ilya Sutskevera co-founder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist, left to launch Safe superintelligencea startup focused on AI security and existential risks. Look at Muratithe former CTO of OpenAI, announced that he would be leaving the company in September and reportedly collecting money for a new AI company.
In October, OpenAI said it was working to expand globally. In addition to the new offices in Zurich, the company plans to open new outposts in New York City, Seattle, Brussels, Paris and Singapore, and already has outposts in London, Tokyo and other cities, in addition to its headquarters in San Francisco.
Zhai, Beyer and Kolesnikov live in Zurich, which has become a relatively prominent tech hub in Europe, according to LinkedIn. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a world-renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly arrested several Google AI experts to work in “a secret European lab in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.
