December 4, 2012 - According to Wired, theOpenAI announced today that it has acquired a new product from competitorGoogle DeepMind Hired three senior computer vision and machine learning engineers: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai.The three will join OpenAI's newly opened office in Zurich, Switzerland, to focus on multimodal AI.
OpenAI has excelled in multimodal AI in recent years. It released the first version of its text-to-graph platform, Dall-E, in 2021, and its chatbot, ChatGPT, initially supported text-only interactions, and then gradually added voice and image capabilities to further improve its multimodal capabilities. The latest version of Dall-E is now directly integrated into the ChatGPT platform. OpenAI has also developed Sora, a highly anticipated generative AI video product that has yet to be widely launched.
In recent years,OpenAI and its rivals intensify battle for top AI talent. These talents often command annual salaries approaching seven figures or more.1AI notes that job-hopping by top AI researchers has become commonplace around the world. For example, Tim Brooks, who was co-responsible for OpenAI's unreleased video generator research, recently jumped to DeepMind, and in March of this year, Microsoft poached Inflection AI's AI lead Mustafa Suleyman, taking most of the startup's staff with him. In addition, Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring Character.AI founder Noam Shazeer back into the fold.
At the same time, OpenAI has seen a number of significant personnel changes. Several key people have left, including co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who went on to found Safe Superintelligence, an AI safety and risk-focused startup, and former CTO Mira Murati, who announced her departure this past September as she raises money for a new AI venture.
OpenAI has been making a lot of moves recently in order to realize its global expansion strategy. In addition to opening a new office in Zurich, the company plans to open branches in New York, Seattle, Brussels, Paris and Singapore. Currently, OpenAI has offices in London, Tokyo and its headquarters in San Francisco.
Beyer, Kolesnikov and Zhai all live in Zurich, which has become a relatively prominent tech center in Europe, according to Collage. Zurich is home to the globally recognized Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), which is known for its computer science department. Apple has also poached some AI experts from Google to work at "a secret European lab in Zurich," the FT reported earlier this year.