OpenAI announced today that it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from its rival. Google DeepMind, all of which will work in a new OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff in an internal memo on Tuesday that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai would join the company to work on multimodal AI. artificial intelligence models capable of performing tasks on different media ranging from image to audio.
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its Dall-E text-to-image conversion platform in 2021. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, however, was initially only capable of interacting with text entries. The company then added voice And picture as multimodal functionality has become an increasingly important part of its product line and AI research. (The latest version of Slab is available directly in ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Soraalthough it is not yet widely available.
The three newly hired researchers are already working closely together, according to Beyer’s report. personal website. While working at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on OpenAI’s published research and public controversies the company was involved in, which he frequently posted to his more than 70,000 followers on CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI by its board last year, Beyer job that “the most sensible explanation” for the firing he had read so far was that Altman was involved in too many other startups at the same time.
As they strive to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its competitors are intense competition to hire a limited group of top researchers from around the world, often offering them annual stipends worth almost seven figures or more. Moving from one company to another is not uncommon for in-demand talent.
Tim Brooksfor example, who previously co-led the research direction on OpenAI’s novel video generator, recently left his position to work at DeepMind. But this high-profile poaching spree extends well beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its head of AI, Mustafa Solimanaway from Inflection AI in March, along with most of the startup’s employees. And Google would have paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the fold.
Over the past few months, several key figures at OpenAI have left the company, either to join direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic or to start their own companies. Ilya Sutskeverco-founder of OpenAI and former chief scientist, left to launch Safe superintelligencea startup focused on AI security and existential risks. Mira Muratiformer chief technology officer of OpenAI, announced that she was leaving the company in September and would be raise funds for a new AI company.
In October, OpenAI said it was working on expanding globally. In addition to the new offices in Zurich, the company plans to open new outposts in New York, 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 all live in Zurich, according to LinkedIn, which has become a relatively important tech hub in Europe. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a world-renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly recruited a number of AI experts from Google to work in “a secret European laboratory in Zurich”, the Financial Times reported earlier this year.