Meta poaches entire OpenAI Zurich office — three top multimodal researchers join Meta's Superintelligence Project
Jun 26, 2025
Key Points
- Meta recruits three OpenAI researchers who founded its Zurich office and co-authored the foundational Vision Transformer paper, signaling escalating competition for multimodal AI talent.
- Mark Zuckerberg personally courts AI researchers while OpenAI faces internal uncertainty about its strategic position within the Meta ecosystem despite substantial resources.
- OpenAI's push for a for-profit conversion and IPO hinges on renegotiating Microsoft's controlling stake in the company, including IP rights and revenue sharing through 2030.
Summary
Meta has poached three senior OpenAI researchers—Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Shen Jia Jiao—who founded and staffed OpenAI's Zurich office. All three are multimodal AI specialists and co-authors of the original Vision Transformer paper from 2020, the foundational work that enabled models like ChatGPT to process images. They are joining Meta's newly renamed Superintelligence Project.
Beyer's path is striking. He earned his PhD in 2018 at Google Brain, where the Vision Transformer work began. He then co-led DeepMind's multimodal team from 2021 to 2024 before joining OpenAI in 2025 to launch the Zurich office. Within months, he left for Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting directly. Instead of delegating to Meta's recruiting team, he personally texts researchers and invites them to dinner. This move puts pressure on other tech giants. Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft face questions about whether they are adequately staffed for the next generation of AI research. OpenAI appears less exposed. Sam Altman runs a dominant consumer app with solid internal momentum and has hired talent at a rate comparable to Meta. The strategic advantage lies in clarity. OpenAI's teams understand they are building what could become a new tech giant. Meta's researchers, despite substantial resources, operate under ambiguity about how AI fits into the broader Meta ecosystem.
Beyer denied reports of a $100 million signing bonus but did not disclose his actual compensation.
The talent raid coincides with turbulence between OpenAI and Microsoft. OpenAI is pursuing a for-profit conversion and potential IPO, which requires Microsoft's approval. Microsoft holds IP rights to all OpenAI models until 2030 and takes 20% of revenue off the top. OpenAI wants to waive the AGI clause, end Microsoft's IP rights, and replace the revenue share with royalties plus equity. Microsoft has signaled reluctance. OpenAI is reportedly considering an antitrust accusation against Microsoft as leverage, though leaking such a nuclear option suggests internal desperation.
Microsoft's position is complex. As a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company negotiating with a multi-trillion-dollar conglomerate, it is not bound by venture capital norms around founder friendliness. Yet Microsoft took genuine risk by pulling forward billions in GPU credits to fund OpenAI's growth. Whether Microsoft should renegotiate depends on fiduciary duty to maximize net present value of the partnership. One framework suggests Microsoft should allow the for-profit conversion in exchange for exclusivity on the OpenAI API for enterprise clients, trading consumer-facing revenue exposure for guaranteed B2B control.