Zuckerberg Snaps Up OpenAI’s Zurich Trio in $100M AI Talent Raid

In a major coup for its AI division, Meta recruited a trio of top researchers from OpenAI's Zurich office, a move personally orchestrated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai left OpenAI to join Meta's superintelligence team, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The departures came days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta was offering up to $100 million in signing bonuses to lure away staff. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the departures without specifying the date or providing further details.

Sources told the WSJ that Zuckerberg personally led the recruitment via direct WhatsApp messages and by hosting dinners at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. The compensation offers reportedly exceeded $100 million.

The three departing researchers co-founded OpenAI's Zurich research hub. Their work focused on computer vision and language understanding for foundational AI models. Their exit represents a significant blow to OpenAI's European operations and could affect OpenAI's European operations.

Mixed Results for Meta's Talent Strategy

Meta scored some wins but also faced setbacks in its recruitment efforts. In June, the company acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion, bringing 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang to its AI team. However, Meta failed to recruit OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, who chose to start independent ventures.

Meta previously gained recognition for open-source AI contributions but has experienced staff turnover. These departures led to delayed launches of models meant to compete with Google's DeepMind, OpenAI and China's DeepSeek. 

Neither Meta nor OpenAI disclosed when the three researchers will start their new positions or which projects they will join. OpenAI has not announced plans to replace the departed researchers in Zurich, raising questions about maintaining its European research presence.

This high-stakes talent raid underscores a fundamental truth of the current AI race: while computing power and data are crucial, the most valuable asset is the small pool of elite researchers capable of building next-generation models. The battle for these minds is becoming the main event, and Meta has just scored a decisive victory.