December 4, 2024 – According to a report by Wired, OpenAI has announced the hiring of three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers from its rival, Google DeepMind. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai have joined the team and will be working at OpenAI’s newly established office in Zurich, Switzerland, focusing on the development of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI).
OpenAI has made significant progress in the field of multimodal AI in recent years. In 2021, the company released the first version of its text-to-image platform, Dall-E. ChatGPT, its chatbot, initially only supported text interaction but has gradually incorporated voice and image functions, further enhancing its multimodal capabilities. Currently, the latest version of DALL-E has been directly integrated into the ChatGPT platform. Additionally, OpenAI has developed a highly anticipated generative AI video product called Sora, which is yet to be widely launched.
The competition for top AI talent between OpenAI and its rivals has intensified in recent years, with these professionals often commanding salaries close to or even exceeding seven figures. Globally, the phenomenon of top AI researchers changing jobs has become increasingly common. For instance, Tim Brooks, who co-led the unreleased video generator research at OpenAI, recently switched to DeepMind. In March of this year, Microsoft poached Mustafa Suleyman, the AI lead at Inflection AI, along with most of the startup’s employees. Moreover, it has been reported that Google paid $2.7 billion to bring back Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has undergone several significant internal personnel changes. Several key figures have left the company, including co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who later founded a startup focused on AI safety and risk called Safe Superintelligence. Former CTO Mira Murati announced her departure in September and is currently raising funds for a new AI venture.
To achieve its global expansion strategy, OpenAI has been actively making moves. Apart from establishing a new office in Zurich, the company plans to open branches in New York, Seattle, Brussels, Paris, and Singapore. Currently, OpenAI already has offices in London, Tokyo, and its headquarters in San Francisco.
According to LinkedIn, Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai all reside in Zurich, which has emerged as a prominent technology center in Europe. Zurich is home to the renowned ETH Zurich, known for its computer science department. As reported by the Financial Times earlier this year, Apple has also poached some AI experts from Google to work at a “secret European lab” in Zurich.
