OpenAI Loses Four Key Researchers to Meta

Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED.

Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures.

It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark Zuckerberg, who is racing to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in building artificial general intelligence. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has been making “giant offers” to OpenAI staffers with “$100 million signing bonuses.” He added that, “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” A source at OpenAI confirmed the offers.

Hongyu Ren was OpenAI’s post-training lead for the o3 and o4 mini models, along with the open source model that’s set to be released this summer, sources say. Post-training is the process of refining a model after it has been trained on a primary dataset.

Shengjia Zhao is highly skilled in deep learning research, according to another source. He joined OpenAI in the summer of 2022, and helped build the startup’s GPT-4 model.

Jiahui Yu did a stint at Google DeepMind before joining OpenAI in late 2023. Shuchao Bi was a manager of OpenAI’s multimodal models.

The departures from OpenAI come shortly after the company lost three researchers from its Zurich office, the Wall Street Journal reported.

OpenAI and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.