'No names': A brief moment in an interview with OpenAI engineers highlights the state of the AI talent wars
OpenAI chief data scientist Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, an OpenAI technical fellow, recently appeared on the "Before AGI" podcast and chatted about working at the company.
A brief exchange in the episode stands out for what isn't said — and is an indicator of just how protective AI companies have become amid the AI talent wars, as Big Tech circles star employees.
"We hired a bunch more people at OpenAI who are really great at debugging," Sidor said while speaking about the importance of debugging AI models. "And I think those are some of our most-prized employees, and I won't even…"
Before Sidor could complete his thought (he mentions not going into "details"), another person on the podcast interjects by saying, "No names," before laughter can be heard.
It's unclear who jumped in with "No names" — it was either OpenAI's Pachocki or podcast host Aleksander Mądry. While it would typically be easy to figure that out by watching the video version of the podcast, that part of the exchange is absent in both of the video versions published to YouTube and X. (You can hear that bit in the audio-only version on Spotify and Apple podcasts.) Business Insider reached out to Madry and OpenAI for comment.
Mądry, the host of "Before AGI," is an MIT professor who is working at OpenAI while on leave from the university, where he is director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning.
Regardless of why the exchange isn't found in the video version of the podcast (it's entirely possible the video version was simply edited down for length or flow or some other reason), Sidor's apparent reluctance to name-drop those employees he feels are some of OpenAI's "most-prized" is telling — if not particularly surprising.
After all, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly created a list of names of AI stars to poach for Meta's Superintelligence Lab, and successfully hired away Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, among others.
Sam Altman said earlier this year that Meta was offering his company's top researchers up to $100 million compensation packages, and Google recently hired away Windsurf's CEO and multiple employees who had been set to join OpenAI.
It's an all-out fight over top AI talent — so it's understandable that an OpenAI engineer might want to be tight-lipped.
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