Meta, the parent of Facebook, has recruited two high-profile researchers from OpenAI—Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung—in its latest AI hiring spree. The move is the latest sign of Meta's increasing ambition to chart the future of artificial intelligence and contend with rivals like Google DeepMind and Apple.
Wired reported that OpenAI has already disabled Wei and Chung's internal Slack accounts to verify their departure. The two researchers are said to have collaborated on many of the big OpenAI projects before moving to Meta, including deep search and large language models O1 and O3.
Jason Wei, who joined OpenAI in 2023, was formerly employed by Google. He has spent the past 40 years mastering chain-of-thought reasoning in AI, which is the process of training AI to solve complex problems one step at a time. Wei also likes reinforcement learning—a technique in which AI models are rewarded for making correct choices, which is now pivotal to the AI revolution.
Hyung Won Chung, who also joined OpenAI in 2023, was a collaborator of Wei's on similar projects. Much of his research is geared toward logical aspects of AI, in particular for reasoning systems and agents. The duo had also been colleagues at Google, so their move to Meta was a notable double hire.
Meta's recent hiring rush has pulled in top AI talent from some of the biggest names in the technology sector. Some recruits to its AI division, most notably those working on superintelligence projects, have been offered as much as $300 million over four years, according to reports.
But not everyone is appreciating this talent grab from the rival organizations. Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell expressed concerns about the cultural impacts of such fierce recruitment efforts. In a podcast with venture capitalists Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner, Dell said that high salaries for even new employees could elicit resentment from long-tenured coworkers.
"It's going to be a cultural challenge, no doubt," Dell said. He cautioned that Meta's internal teams may become divided if current employees feel ignored or underappreciated in the face of the huge pay packages that newcomers are receiving.
