Meta hires two more OpenAI top researchers amid $300 million AI talent war: Report
Jason Wei
and Hyung Won Chung from Sam Altman-led OpenAI. According to a Wired report, OpenAI has deactivated the internal Slack account of both the researchers. As per the report, both Wei and Chung have a close working relationship. Meta has been on a hiring spree in recent times. The company has aggressively hired talent from rival companies – Apple, GoogleDeepMind, GitHub and others. Meta is allegedly offering up to $300 million over four years to its top AI talent.
Who are OpenAI researchers Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chun that Meta has hired
As per Wired report, Jason Wei worked on OpenAI's o3 and deep search models. He joined the company in 2023. Before OpenAI, he worked at Google on chain-of-thought research, that involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step.
A self-described 'diehard' at OpenAI, Wei became deeply passionate about reinforcement learning — a way of teaching AI by giving it rewards for good actions and penalties for mistakes. This method has become an important part of AI research, and many of the experts recently hired by Meta for its superintelligence team are specialists in this field.
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Hyung Won Chung also joined OpenAI in 2023. He worked on some of the same projects at the company as Wei. These included deep research and OpenAI's o1 model. His research is primarily focused on reasoning and agents, the website says.
Interestingly,. Chung overlapped with Wei at Google as well, and joined OpenAI at the same time as Wei.
Dell CEO warns Mark Zuckerberg's AI hiring spree
Dell CEO Michael Dell has raised concerns about the internal culture impact Meta may face due to its aggressive hiring of artificial intelligence talent from rivals – Google DeepMind, OpenAI, GitHub, Apple and others. Speaking on the BG2 podcast hosted by Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on Thursday, Dell warned that bringing in top AI professionals at high salaries could lead to dissatisfaction among existing staff at Meta Platforms. 'It'll be a challenge culturally for sure,' Dell said.
He further explained that offering higher pay to new hires could make current employees feel left out or underappreciated, which may result in friction within teams and create a long line of 'complaining' employees outside CEO Mark Zuckerberg's office.
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