Meta’s Bold Strategy to Beat OpenAI Starts With These 8 AI Innovators

OpenAI might be the center of the AI development world these days, but the competition has been heating up for quite a while. And few competitors are bankrolled on the same level as Meta. With a market capitalization of more than $1.75 trillion and a CEO who’s not afraid to spend heavily, Meta has been on a hiring spree in the AI world for months, poaching top tier talent from a variety of competitors. It appeared recently that the wave of high-profile (and high-dollar) recruitments was coming to an end. In August, Meta quietly announced a freeze on hiring after adding roughly 50 AI researchers and engineers. This month, though, two more big names have joined the Meta roster. While Meta might have a gap to close with its AI rivals, the company has assembled an all-star team to catch up and move forward. Here are some of the most notable experts to come on board. Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab Tulloch partnered with OpenAI’s former chief technical officer Mira Murati to launch Thinking Machines Lab in February of this year. Now he’s returning to his roots. Considered a leading researcher in the AI field, Tulloch previously spent 11 years at Meta, leaving in 2023 to join OpenAI, then departing with Murati. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has been chasing Tulloch for a while, reportedly making an offer with a $1.5 billion compensation package at one point, which Tulloch rejected. (Meta has called the description of the offer “inaccurate and ridiculous.”) There’s no word on what Tulloch was offered that made him decide to move. Ke Yang, Senior Director of Machine Learning at Apple Yang, who was appointed to lead Apple’s AI-driven web search effort just weeks ago, is another big October Meta hire. At Apple, his team (Answers, Knowledge and Information, or AKI) was working to make Siri more Chat-GPT-like by pulling that information from the web, making his departure one of Meta’s most notable poachings. Meta convinced him to come over after recruiting several of his colleagues. Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Zhao joined Meta in June to serve as chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Beyond co-creating ChatGPT, he also played a role in building GPT-4 and led synthetic data at OpenAI for a stint. “Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post in July. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.” Daniel Gross, co-founder of Safe Superintelligence As it did with Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. When that offer was rejected, Zuckerberg began looking for talent, luring co-founder and CEO Gross in June. Gross is working on AI products for Meta’s superintelligence group. By joining Meta, he’s reunited with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, with whom he once created the venture fund NFDG. Ruoming Pang, Apple’s head of AI models Pang was one of the first high-profile departures from Apple to Meta, making the jump in July. At the time, he was Apple’s top executive overseeing AI models and had been with the company since 2021. While there, he helped develop the large language model that powers Apple Intelligence and other AI features, such as email and webpage summaries. Matt Deitke, co-founder of Vercept Vercept is a start-up that’s attempting to build AI agents that use other software to autonomously perform tasks, something that caught Zuckerberg’s attention. Deitke proved hard to lure, though. He reportedly turned down a $125 million, four-year offer, but a direct appeal by Zuckerberg (and a reported doubling of that offer) convinced him to make the move (with the blessing of his peers). Kiana Ehsani, his co-founder and CEO, announced his departure on social media, joking, “We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.” Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI Wang left his startup to join Meta after the social media company made a $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI (without any voting power in the company). “As you’ve probably gathered from recent news, opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in a memo to staff. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.” Wang joined Meta’s superintelligence unit. Scale made its name by helping companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft prepare data used to train AI models. Meta was already one of its biggest customers. Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub Friedman was already a part of Meta’s Advisory Group before he was brought on full-time. That external advisory council provides guidance on technology and product development. Now, he’s working with Wang to run the superintelligence unit. Friedman previously was CEO of GitHub, a cloud-based platform that hosts code for software development. Most recently, he was a board member at the AI investment firm he started with Safe Superintelligence’s Gross. As for what Zuck is going to do with all this talent, the sky’s the limit, but there’s some catchup to do first. The Llama Large Language Model hasn’t quite matched up to those of OpenAI or Google, but with Meta’s gargantuan user base (3.4 billion people use one of the company’s apps each day), Meta’s AI could still be one of the most widely used in the years to come. BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE