OpenAI announced today it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from competitor Google DeepMind, all of whom will work in a newly opened OpenAI office in Zurich, Switzerland. OpenAI executives told staff in an internal memo on 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 a variety of environments ranging from images to audio.
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and released the first version of its Dall-E text-to-image platform in 2021. However, its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, was initially only able to interact with text input. The company later added voice and image features as multimodal functionality became an increasingly important part of its AI product line and research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly on ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a long-awaited generative AI video product called Sora, although it has not yet made it widely available.
All three newly appointed researchers are already working closely together, according to Beyer’s personal website. While working at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on the research OpenAI published and the public controversies the company was embroiled in, which he frequently posted to his more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted by OpenAI from its board of directors last year, Beyer posted that the “most reasonable” 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 race to develop the most advanced AI models, OpenAI and its competitors compete intensely to 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 in-demand talent.
Tim Brooks, for example, who previously led the research direction of OpenAI’s unreleased video generator, recently left to work at DeepMind. But the noise poaching extends far beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its head of AI, Mustafa Suleiman, away from Inflection AI in March — along with most of the startup’s employees. Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazir back into the fold.
Over the past few months, a number of key figures at OpenAI have left the company, either to join direct competitors such as DeepMind and Anthropic, or to start their own ventures. Ilya Sutzkever, co-founder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist, left to start Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on AI safety and existential risks. Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, announced that she is leaving the company in September and is reportedly raising money for a new artificial intelligence venture.
In October, OpenAI said it was working on global expansion. In addition to the new offices in Zurich, the company plans to open new offices in New York, Seattle, Brussels, Paris and Singapore, and already has offices in London, Tokyo and other cities, in addition to its headquarters in San Francisco.
Jai, 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 tapped a number of AI experts from Google to work in a “secret European lab in Zurich,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year.
