OpenAI announced today that it has hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from rival Google DeepMind. They will all work from OpenAI’s newly opened office in Zurich, Switzerland. On Tuesday, OpenAI executives told employees in an internal meme that Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai would join the company to work on multimodal AI, AI models capable of performing tasks in a variety of media, from images to audio.
OpenAI has long been at the forefront of multimodal AI and in 2021 released the first version of its Dall-E text-to-image platform. However, its flagship ChatGPT chatbot was initially only capable of interacting with text input. The company later added voice and image capabilities as multimodal functionality became an increasingly significant part of its product line and artificial intelligence research. (The latest version of Dall-E is available directly from ChatGPT.) OpenAI has also developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Sora, although it has not yet been made widely available.
According to Beyer, all three newly hired researchers are already working closely together personal website. While at DeepMind, Beyer appears to have kept a close eye on research published by OpenAI and the public controversies the company has been embroiled in, which he frequently posted about to his more than 70,000 followers on X. When CEO Sam Altman was briefly last year kicked out of OpenAI by Beyer’s management sent 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 artificial intelligence models, OpenAI and its rivals compete intensely to hire a confined 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 high-demand talent.
Tim Brooksfor example, who previously co-led research on the as-yet-unreleased OpenAI video generator, recently left to work at DeepMind. But high-profile poaching goes far beyond DeepMind and OpenAI. Microsoft hired its AI leader, Mustafa Suleimanaway from Inflection AI in March – along with most of the startup’s employees. And Google apparently paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the game.
Over the past few months, many key figures at OpenAI have left the company to join direct competitors such as DeepMind and Anthropic, or to start their own ventures. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, left to launch it Secure superintelligencea startup focusing on AI security and existential threats. Mira Murati, former chief technology officer at OpenAI, announced she was leaving the company in September, and that’s reportedly happening collecting money for a fresh artificial intelligence venture.
In October, OpenAI said it was working on global expansion. In addition to fresh offices in Zurich, the company plans to open new facilities in Fresh York, Seattle, Brussels, Paris and Singapore, and in addition to the headquarters in San Francisco, it already has branches in London, Tokyo and other cities.
According to LinkedIn, which has become a relatively significant technology center in Europe, Zhai, Beyer and Kolesnikov live in Zurich. The city is home to ETH Zurich, a public research university with a world-renowned computer science department. Apple has also reportedly hired several artificial intelligence experts from Google to work in a “secret European lab in Zurich”, Financial Times. was reported earlier this year.