The hires—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai—were previously based at OpenAI’s Zurich office, which they helped establish late last year, WSJ noted in its report.
“The three set up OpenAI’s office in Zurich late last year. Before that, they worked together at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI unit. A spokeswoman for OpenAI confirmed that the three researchers have left the company,” the report added.
The report comes just days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta had offered some OpenAI employees signing bonuses of $100 million and more in an attempt to recruit them.
“They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said on the
Uncapped podcast that aired on June 17, hosted by his brother, adding, “At least, so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been directly involved in recruiting top AI talent since April, following internal dissatisfaction over the performance and reception of the company’s latest large language model, Llama 4, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
In May, Meta also invested $14 billion in AI startup Scale and appointed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a newly created superintelligence team. Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to recruit OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, though both declined.
Despite some setbacks, Meta is continuing to expand its AI capabilities. The company has said it plans to spend up to $65 billion in capital expenditures this year, much of it directed toward AI infrastructure and research.
Meta is now positioning itself for a comeback, with reports suggesting Zuckerberg is assembling a dedicated team to build artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI systems designed to match or exceed the full scope of human intelligence.
Unlike current AI models, which are trained for narrow tasks such as image generation or text s, AGI aspires to replicate broad human reasoning and decision-making, potentially transforming the future of computing.