Meta has pulled off a coup in the artificial intelligence competition, absorbing three senior researchers from OpenAI into its elite Superintelligence team.
Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who co-founded OpenAI’s Zurich office and also previously worked at Google DeepMind, have officially exited OpenAI and joined Meta to build artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Their departure is a change in the balance of power, especially in the European AI research space, where Zurich has become a strategic outpost for some of the most advanced work in machine learning.
Their recruitment is part of Meta’s massive, under-the-radar goal to take over AGI development. At the centre of this is Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, a unit granted deep access to the company’s compute infrastructure and charged with building AI models that can rival or even surpass human reasoning.
It’s a pivot that founder Mark Zuckerberg is not leaving to chance.
Multiple reports now point to Zuckerberg taking a personal lead in poaching efforts, bypassing HR and headhunting directly via WhatsApp. He’s allegedly coordinating efforts through a “Recruiting Party” group chat and following up with private dinners in his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. The approach is unconventional but it’s starting to yield results.
One of the most headline-grabbing wins so far is the $14.3 billion investment Meta recently made in Scale AI. The deal gave Meta a 49% stake in the data-labeling company and also brought on board Alexandr Wang, Scale’s 28-year-old founder and CEO, to lead its superintelligence vision.
The investment values Scale at $29 billion and ranks among Meta’s most expensive strategic plays since acquiring WhatsApp.
Still, the road hasn’t been smooth. Meta has failed to secure OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, both of whom have taken off in new directions.
Sutskever is now heading up Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a stealth startup focused on developing safe AGI, while Schulman has joined another secretive firm led by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Their departures from OpenAI hint at ideological rifts and the growing splintering of high-level AI talent.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been publicly dismissive of Zuckerberg’s charm offensive. In a recent podcast with his brother Jack, Altman quipped, “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers].”
But the facts on the ground are changing fast. The exodus of top researchers, Meta’s multibillion-dollar bets, and Zuckerberg’s visible sense of urgency all point to a conclusion that the competition is just starting and Meta has no intention of staying behind.
With compensation packages rumoured to exceed $100 million for senior hires, Analysts are bothered about market distortion and the ethical implications of consolidating so much power within a handful of firms.
Meta’s open-source LLaMA models may have generated buzz, but many insiders acknowledge the company has lagged behind rivals like OpenAI and Google in performance and adoption.
The company seems to be correcting that, not just with money, but with a structural overhaul that places AGI development at the centre of its future.
