Meta Hires Three Top OpenAI Researchers Amid AI Talent War
June 25, 2025 — Silicon Valley, CA – Meta has scored a major win in the ongoing AI talent war by hiring three senior researchers from OpenAI, including the founding team of OpenAI’s Zurich office. The recruits — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — have joined Meta’s ambitious superintelligence team, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
This move is part of Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment blitz, which has included lavish offers reportedly exceeding $100 million, along with private WhatsApp messages, exclusive dinners, and a curated “Recruiting Party 🎉” group chat.
Zuckerberg’s $100M Strategy Begins to Deliver
While some in the AI community, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have mocked Zuckerberg’s methods as desperate or excessive, Meta’s latest hires show the strategy may be working.
“At least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers],” Altman recently said during a podcast with his brother Jack.
That claim now rings hollow, with three senior AI minds jumping ship.
Zuckerberg has also drawn headlines for investing $14 billion in Scale AI, effectively landing its CEO Alexandr Wang in one of the priciest hires in tech history.
Bigger Names Still Out of Reach
Despite Meta’s high-profile wins, the social media giant has failed to attract AI pioneers like Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, who instead left OpenAI to launch their own startups.
Still, the recruitment of Beyer, Kolesnikov, and Zhai boosts Meta’s credibility as it races to develop cutting-edge general artificial intelligence in competition with OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind.
With stakes rising in what some are calling the “AI arms race,” expect more billion-dollar moves and talent showdowns in the mont
