Mark Zuckerberg’s frenzied plan to snap up A.I. talent through personalized outreach, aggressive pitches and eight-figure bonuses appears to be paying off. Meta has recruited OpenAI staffers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai to join its newly-formed team dedicated to advanced forms of A.I., as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The three researchers all formerly worked at Google DeepMind and were relatively new to OpenAI, having been tapped by the ChatGPT-maker at the end of last year to open an office in Zurich. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed that the trio have departed the company but declined to comment further.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has so far appeared unfazed by Zuckerberg’s efforts to poach his staffers. “It’s like, okay, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing, what’s next?” Altman said on the Hard Fork podcast this week.
The scale of Meta’s hiring push became clear earlier this month when the company brought on Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI, following an investment of more than $14 billion in his company. Wang is expected to play a central role in Meta’s new A.I. unit, a roughly 50-person team focused on developing superintelligence, a form of A.I. with capabilities surpassing those of humans.
In 2025, Zuckerberg has launched an aggressive spending campaign to accelerate Meta’s A.I. ambitions and expand its data center and hardware infrastructure amid growing frustration with the company’s progress in the field. Alongside plans to spend up to $72 billion on capital expenditures this year, he’s pulling out all the stops to lure top talent from competitors, personally pitching recruits at his homes and rearranging office seating to position the superintelligence team nearby.
In some cases, Meta has attempted to entice employees at OpenAI by promising signing bonuses as high as $100 million, revealed Altman earlier this month on an episode of the Uncapped podcast. “So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” he said. But that’s not for lack of trying—Meta has apparently tried, and failed, to recruit OpenAI staffers including researchers Noam Brown and Bill Peebles and co-founder John Schulman.
OpenAI isn’t the only company on Zuckerberg’s radar. The billionaire reportedly also tried to acquire Perplexity AI and Safe Superintelligence, the A.I. startup co-founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. After Meta was rebuffed by the latter, it instead recruited two of Safe Superintelligence’s other key figures—Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, according to CNBC. Other notable hires include Google DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Sesame AI’s Johan Schalkwyk.
As Meta builds out its new A.I. unit, it’s not the only player fueling an all-out hiring war. In response to Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment tactics, rival companies have begun promoting staff or boosting compensation to retain top talent. Shortly after Meta approached Google DeepMind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, the researcher was promoted to Google’s chief A.I. architect, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI has also reportedly countered Meta’s overtures by offering targeted employees more money and greater responsibilities.