Three Authors of Google's Vision Transformer Announce Joining OpenAI
OpenAI recruits three top researchers from Google DeepMind's Zurich office, including Xiaohua Zhai, Lucas Beyer, and Alexander Kolesnikov, to lead multimodal AI research.
Recently, OpenAI experienced a new personnel change. However, this time it was not the departure of a major technical figure but rather the recruitment of fresh talent from Google.
These "newcomers" come from Google DeepMind's Zurich office, including senior research scientist Xiaohua Zhai, and research scientists Lucas Beyer and Alexander Kolesnikov. During their time at Google DeepMind, the three were close collaborators, working together on important research such as ViT. They will now join forces to establish OpenAI’s Zurich office.
In an internal memo to employees on Tuesday, OpenAI executives announced that the trio would focus on multimodal AI research after joining the company.
During their time at DeepMind, Beyer seemed to closely follow OpenAI’s published research and the public controversies the company became involved in. He frequently posted related information on X to his over 70,000 followers.
Last year, when CEO Sam Altman was briefly dismissed by OpenAI's board, Beyer posted that the "most reasonable" explanation he had read for the dismissal was that Altman was involved in too many other startup ventures.
While competing to develop cutting-edge AI models, OpenAI and its competitors are also fiercely competing to recruit a limited number of top researchers from around the world, often offering near seven-figure or higher annual salaries. For the most sought-after talent, it is not uncommon to switch between companies.
For example, Tim Brooks, who was responsible for OpenAI's Sora project, recently left to join DeepMind. However, the aggressive poaching trend is not limited to DeepMind and OpenAI. In March of this year, Microsoft poached AI leader Mustafa Suleyman and most of the staff from Inflection AI. Meanwhile, Google spent $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into their fold.
In recent months, several key figures at OpenAI have left the company, some joining direct competitors like DeepMind and Anthropic, while others have founded their own startups. OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, after leaving the company, founded a startup focused on AI safety and existential risks called Safe Superintelligence. OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati announced her departure in September, reportedly to raise funds for a new AI venture.
In October this year, OpenAI stated that it is striving to expand globally. In addition to the new Zurich office, the company plans to open new branches in New York City, Seattle, Brussels, Paris, and Singapore. Beyond its San Francisco headquarters, OpenAI already has offices in London, Tokyo, and other cities.
According to LinkedIn profiles, Zhai, Beyer, and Kolesnikov all live in Zurich, which has become a prominent tech hub in Europe. Zurich is home to ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), a public research university with a globally renowned computer science department. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that Apple had also poached some AI experts from Google to work at a "secret European lab" in Zurich.